Jean Piaget was a genetic epistemologist and psychologist from Switzerland. He is prominently known for his intellectual development model which explored how infants develop mentally during the progression of infancy. Before Piaget's philosophy, infants were frequently considered as smaller adults. Rather, Piaget proposed that the child thinking way primarily differs from the way an adult thinks. Piaget's model had an enormous impact on the rise of developmental psychology, which was a distinct sub-area in psychology and had a significant contribution to the education field (Evans, 1973). Also, he is accredited as a constructivist model pioneer, which proposes that humans actively build their understanding of the world using the relations between their experiences and world. Generally, Piaget, the twentieth-century scholar, developed highly dominant theories on the cognitive development stages, turning out to be a major figure in the areas of developmental psychology and cognitive philosophy.
Early Life
Piaget was born in, 1896 in Switzerland on as the firstborn in his family. Rebecca Jackson, his mother, ascribed his strong early fascination with the sciences to his obsessed affinities. However, his father, who was a mediaeval professor of literature, demonstrated a zealous commitment to his education – an attribute that Piaget started replicating from an initial stage of development (Evans, 1973). When he was aged ten, Piaget's interest in mollusks made him visit the natural history local museum, a place he spent many hours staring at specimens.
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During his high school and when he was aged eleven years he wrote a short research essay on the albino sparrow. His articles on mollusks received extensive publications by the time he was an adolescent. His readers were not aware of how old he was and believed he was a professional on the subject. After graduating from high school, he proceeded to the University of Neuchâtel to study Zoology. In 1918, he got his Doctor of Philosophy in the natural sciences (Evans, 1973). Further, he studied psychology during the same year at the University of Zürich. It is from this university where he established a more profound fascination towards psychoanalysis. During the subsequent year, Piaget attended the Sorbonne in Paris to study abnormal psychology.
Pioneering Developmental Work
Piaget worked at the Binet Laboratory in 1920, where he assessed the findings of standardized cognitive tests which had been created by Simon. The tests aimed at measuring child intellect and drawing relationships between the age of a kid and the type of their mistakes. Consequently, this created new queries to Piaget concerning the learning process of children (Bringuier, 1980). Ultimately, Piaget concluded that the test was very rigid and he reevaluated the tests, allowing kids to describe the rationality of their wrong responses. By analyzing the explanations of the youngsters, he noted that the reasoning power of children did not have flaws eventually. In fields where kids did not have life experiences as a reference point, they rationally applied their imaginings for compensation. Piaget further determined that actual knowledge must not be compared with understanding or intelligence.
Although Piaget's career entailed the work of natural sciences, he started moving towards working as a psychologist in the 1920s. In 1923, Piaget wedded Valentine Châtenay, and they together had three kids. Through observing his children, Piaget was able to form a foundation for many of his future philosophies. He was a genetic epistemologist. In his text, Genetic Epistemology, Piaget explained that "What the genetic epistemology proposes is discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms, following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge" (Piaget, 1970).
Piaget's early work with intelligence tests at the Binet Laboratory had led him to conclude that the reasoning of kids is unlike that of grownups. Even though this is a commonly accepted idea today, it was regarded as ground-breaking at that period. This observation is what stimulated his passion for comprehending how knowledge develops during infancy. Piaget proposed that kids arrange the knowledge they gain via their interactions and experiences into groups called schemas (Boring, Werner, Langfeld & Yerkes, 1952). In the present day, Piaget is predominantly famous for his study on the children's mental growth. He investigated the cognitive development of his three kids and developed a model which described the phases which kids undergo in developing cognitive and formal thinking processes.
The Contributions of Piaget to Psychology
Piaget supported the notion that the thinking of children and adults is different, and his research discovered various crucial milestones in the children's cognitive development. Piaget's work as well made other people more interested in cognitive psychology and developmental psychology (Bringuier, 1980). Piagetian philosophies are extensively researched on in the modern world by scholars of both education and psychology. During his career, Piaget held various chair posts and researched genetics and psychology. In 1955, he established the International Center for Genetic Epistemology and worked as a manager before dying in 1980.
Piaget's Influence on Psychology
The theories of Piaget continue being under study in the fields of genetics, education, sociology and psychology. His work had a significant contribution to the human understanding of children's cognitive development. Although earlier scholars had frequently viewed kids only as a smaller form of grownups, Piaget assisted in demonstrating that infancy is an important and unique human development stage. Piaget's work as well had a significant influence on other famous psychologists like Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner.
Brainerd and Reyna (2005) wrote an excellent review of Piaget's influence. The authors assert that during the process of his long and largely productive career, Piaget made significant contributions to academic work to areas including linguistics, sociology, science philosophy, education, along with evolutionary biology. However, most importantly, Piaget was the twentieth-century developmental psychologist. For twenty years, between the beginning of the 1960s and the start of the 1980s, Piaget's study conclusions and Piaget's theory ruled the developmental psychology globally, similar to the dominance of Freud's concepts conquered abnormal psychology decades before. Nearly solo, he changed the developmental research focus from its conventional emphasis on emotional and social development to cognitive development.
Piaget's Legacy and Death
Piaget passed on aged 84 years in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 16, 1980. He is accredited for the development of completely new areas of systematic research, with a critical effect on the fields of developmental psychology and cognitive model (Bringuier, 1980). Nevertheless, Piaget's ideas received some criticism. Some researchers pointed out that his work did not put into consideration geographical and sociocultural dissimilarities amongst kids and that certain grownups are demonstrated through research studies not to have attained the fourth phase of his stages of development.
Piaget received various honorary accolades and degrees, which included the prestigious Erasmus (1972) as well as Balzen (1979) awards. Having authored over 50 books and multiple papers, he summarized his desire for the continuous search for scientific knowledge by asserting that "The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly" (Piaget, 1970). Overall, it is thought that no conceptual theory which has more significant impact on developmental psychology than the one developed by Piaget. Piaget's conceptual theories have prompted extensive research.
References
Brainerd, C. J., & Reyna, V. F. (2005). The science of false memory . Oxford University Press.
Bringuier, J.C. (1980). Conversations with Jean Piaget. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boring, E. G., Werner, H. E., Langfeld, H. S., & Yerkes, R. M. (1952). A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol IV.
Evans, R. I. (1973). Jean Piaget: The man and his ideas . EP Dutton.
Piaget, J. (1970). Genetic epistemology. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
