Jean Piaget: the Child as Scientist and Stages That Shaped a Century

Every teacher-training course contains the same table: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational. Almost everything that made the underlying work interesting has been removed on the way into that table.Piaget began as a biologist. He published on molluscs before he had finished school and took a doctorate on the snails of the Valais in 1918, and the vocabulary he later applied to thinking, adaptation, assimilation and accommodation, was carried over from that work. He arrived at children by accident, while marking intelligence tests in Paris in the early 1920s. What caught his attention was not that children gave wrong answers but that children of the same age gave the same wrong answers. The method he built to follow that observation, an interview that follows the child instead of a script, was unstandardised, and he knew it.The ages he attached to his stages were too late, and later researchers showed it repeatedly, often by making the task easier to understand rather than easier to solve. The questions he asked have proved far harder to replace.This book separates the two, follows the quarrel with Vygotsky and the neo-Piagetian corrections that came after, and explains why a model that is wrong in most of its details remains difficult to work without. It is a work of intellectual history, not a curriculum guide.