Behavior: Jean Piaget: Mapping the Growing Mind

IT is late afternoon, but the four-year-old insists: “It can’t be. I haven’t had my nap.” Such is the mind of the child, by most indications illogical and full of nonsense. Not so, says Jean Piaget, a grumpy, mountain-climbing Swiss philosopher who is also one of the world’s foremost child psychologists. Few researchers have so meticulously or provocatively mapped that terra incognita, the mental world of children. For 50 years, Piaget, now 73, has been discovering through deceptively simple experiments that children actually have surprisingly intricate thinking skills that adults should learn to appreciate and understand better than they do.

Piaget was little heeded in the U.S. during the 1940s and early ’50s. Not all of his 30 abstruse books and myriad articles had yet been translated from their original French and, says one child psychologist, “we ignored him because we were so busy with Freud.” Piaget’s current acceptance is a clear sign of how the preoccupation with orthodox Freudian concerns is broadening to other areas (TIME, March 7). A flood of Piaget translations and explications has appeared.* Piaget-oriented researchers are expanding and following up his leads, and his insights are in growing vogue among U.S. educators, psychologists and some parents. The most enthusiastic compare his work in significance to Freud’s pioneering exploration of the emotions. What many people find so appealing about Piaget, as Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles points out, is that in contrast to psychoanalytically oriented researchers, he emphasizes “man the developing thinker rather than man the universal neurotic.”

Dreams That Fly. As Freud found that slips of the tongue are keys to the unconscious, Piaget finds that the mental “mistakes” children make are clues to intellectual processes that are really precursors of grown-up thinking. An infant, for example, initially may suck at almost anything that comes near his mouth; soon, when he is hungry, he learns to persevere only when his lips close over a nipple. The reflex-driven gropings by which he learns to recognize the nipple and distinguish it from a rattle, as Piaget sees it, are a first use of trial-and-error logic. Piaget considers this learning process of infancy one phase in the first of four distinct but sometimes overlapping stages. The other stages: ages two to seven, seven to eleven, and eleven to 15.

During the second stage, the child thinks about everything in terms of his own activities; he believes that the moon follows him around, or that dreams fly in through his window when he goes to bed. Erroneous though these ideas are, they help the child comprehend that actions have causes. In this period, the child is not egocentric by choice. Parents should understand, says the University of Rochester’s David Elkind, a leading Piaget scholar, that intellectual immaturity and not moral perversity is the reason why a preschooler continues to pester his mother even after she plainly tells him she has a headache.

Learning Alternatives. The child reaches the threshold of grown-up logic as early as seven and usually by eleven. Before that point, he may think that water becomes “more to drink” when it is poured from a short, squat glass into a tall, thin one with the same capacity. The reason for this stubborn misconception is that the child is paying attention only to static features of his environment, not to transformations. Now, at the age Piaget calls that of “concrete” intellectual activity, the child can deduce that pouring does not change the quantity of the water. He has begun to reason and to grasp the essential principle of the equation.

Between the ages of eleven and 15, the child begins to deal with abstractions and, in a primitive but methodical way, set up hypotheses and then test them, as a scientist does. In one experiment, Piaget handed children a weight at the end of a string and asked them to find out what determines the speed of the pendulum’s swing. As he watched and asked questions, he found that the children were spontaneously considering all the possible variations: changing the weight, letting it drop from increasing heights, giving it stronger shoves, or changing the length of the string. Even children who never had seen pendulums before tried each possibility until they found that only shortening or lengthening the string did the trick. Quite possibly, Piagetians sometimes speculate, adolescents’ fascination with their ability to visualize alternatives is what makes them so eager to test new life-styles and Utopian ideals.

Classroom Hens. The timetable that seems to control the development of intellectual skills, Piaget is convinced, suggests that man’s capacity for logical thought is not learned but is embedded, along with hair color and sex, in his genes. These innate rational tendencies do not mature, however, unless they are used. Although Piaget has refrained from applying his findings directly to teaching, educators see some implications. A child cannot be forced to develop understanding any faster than the rate at which his powers mature to their full potential, and there is a limit to what overeager parents and teachers can achieve. At the same time, a child who does not get the chance to apply his developing abilities and test their limitations may never reach his full intellectual capacity. Thus programs aimed at the disadvantaged, like Operation Head Start, may greatly increase a child’s chance of attaining that potential.

Piaget has observed repeatedly that children explore the complexities of their world with immense zest, and his findings have given encouragement and innumerable specific suggestions to the “discovery method” of teaching. Now used in many schools across the U.S. and in Great Britain, the method draws also on the ideas of John Dewey, Italian Educator Maria Montessori and Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner. Discovery classrooms, in essence, are informal laboratories where children gain an early familiarity with the principles of Euclidean geometry by manipulating variously shaped objects, and learn fundamentals of counting and reproduction by charting the egg production of classroom hens. As Piaget said recently, “a ready-made truth is only half a truth. The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.”

Piaget himself is a lapsed biologist who never outgrew his fascination with the orderly growth of organisms. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he was a child prodigy who published important papers on mollusks before he was out of high school, later became “haunted by the idea of discovering a sort of embryology of intelligence.” In 1920 he went to work in the Paris laboratory of Psychologist Théodore Simon, a co-developer with Alfred Binet of the first successful IQ test. Poring over the “wrong” answers that children regularly gave on the tests, Piaget was surprised to see that the responses fell into patterns that differed according to the children’s ages.

Appointed director of studies at Geneva’s Rousseau Institute, Piaget continued to investigate this phenomenon. He spent long hours observing the crib activity of his own three children, shot marbles on hands and knees with Genevan boys as he tested their ideas and feelings about ethics and the rules of games, and gently asked schoolchildren questions about the numbers and groupings of flowers and beads that he gave them to play with. His investigations led him to detailed observations on how children acquire such complicated concepts and abilities as space, geometry, causality, logic, moral judgment and memory. Le Patron, as he is known to associates, currently presides over a staff of 25 at his Institute of Educational Science and churns out most of his books and articles during long summer retreats at a farmhouse in the Alps.

Compelling Conception. Piaget’s critics feel that his conclusions are based more on his canny intuition than on demonstrable scientific evidence. He scorns the use of statistical measurements and controls, which makes it difficult to prove that the children he has studied are typical. Some educators and child-guidance experts, particularly in the U.S., say Piaget’s sweeping concepts are of little help in explaining or diagnosing the differing motivations and accomplishments of individual children.

Nonetheless, supporters outnumber detractors. Harvard’s Bruner, Piaget’s most appreciative critic in the U.S., voices a common reaction when he acknowledges that Piaget’s general conception of the growing mind “is so compelling that even in attacking it one is inevitably influenced by it.” At the very least, Jean Piaget has enabled adults to approach children more sensitively and realistically—and perhaps even with greater awe.

*American publishers recently have brought out two guides for laymen, Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development (Prentice-Hall, $6.95), and An Outline of Piaget’s Developmental Psychology for Students and Teachers (Basic Books, $4.95). In addition Piaget and his longtime associate, Barbel Inhelder, have summarized his discoveries in a new book called The Psychology of the Child (Basic Books, $5.95).