Piaget: Foundations

Five interviews into how a child builds a mind

A course on the thought of Jean Piaget.

Psychology

What you will learn

• State Piaget's central reframe: development is a change in the KIND of thinking, not merely the amount known.
• Describe the clinical interview method and why a wrong answer is treated as data, not error.
• Name genetic epistemology — the study of how knowledge itself is built up in the growing child.
• Define schema, assimilation, and accommodation, and tell them apart with a clear example.
• Explain equilibration as the drive that pushes a child from one structure to a more adequate one.
• See why development is neither pure maturation nor pure learning, but construction through action.
• Describe the sensorimotor stage: intelligence as action, before mental representation.
• Define object permanence and give the evidence that young infants lack it.

Course outline

1. The Child Is Not a Small Adult — Piaget's founding reframe: a child does not think like an adult with less information, but like a different kind of thinker with its own coherent logic — and the way to see that logic is to take the…
2. How a Mind Changes — The engine of development: schemas, and the two complementary processes — assimilation (fitting new experience into existing schemas) and accommodation (changing schemas to fit new experience)…
3. Out of Sight — The sensorimotor stage (birth to ~2), where intelligence lives in action. Its signature achievement is object permanence — the knowledge that a thing still exists when it can no longer be seen…
4. More in the Tall Glass — The pre-operational stage (~2-7): rich in language and imagination, but not yet capable of the mental operations that hold quantity fixed. Its signature failures — non-conservation and centration…
5. Reason Arrives — The two mature stages: concrete operational (~7-11), where reversible operations finally allow conservation, classification, and seriation on real things; and formal operational (~11+), where thought…

Works read in this course

• The Child's Conception of the World (1926) — my early study of children's reasoning about dreams, thought, and reality — the founding demonstration of the clinical method.
• The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1936) — the sensorimotor infant — schemas, assimilation, and accommodation traced through the first two years (much of it observed on my own three children).
• The Construction of Reality in the Child (1937) — how the infant builds the permanent object, space, causality, and time out of its own action — the source of the object-permanence and A-not-B evidence.
• The Child's Conception of Number (1941) — conservation of number and quantity; the beaker task and the emergence of concrete operations.
• The Psychology of Intelligence (1947) — the theory in brief — operations, reversibility, and equilibration as the logic of development.
• The Child's Conception of Space (1948, with Inhelder) — the three-mountains task and the study of egocentrism in the spatial domain.
• The Growth of Logical Thinking (1955, with Inhelder) — formal operations — the pendulum problem and the adolescent's systematic, hypothetical reasoning.
• The Psychology of the Child (1966, with Inhelder) — the compact synthesis of the whole stage theory, co-written with Bärbel Inhelder.

Part of the Simposeum course library.