by Simon Willover
Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who composed a 4-stage model of child developement based on his studies. Piaget's ideas have pushed our culture forward and helped parents better understand their children. As a child, Piaget was interested in zoology and wrote a few paper about mullosks (a species similar to snails). He became interested in studying children after he realized that they consistently answered some questions incorrectly on Alfred Binet's intelligence tests. Piaget was inspired by this and decided to do research on the language, and then the thinking of children. Eventually, he theorized that children acquire specific pieces of knowledge as their language matures in specific ways, and he noticed that this is somewhat consistent between different children. Piaget's model of child developement is essentially an organized way to describe which pieces of knowledge children are statistically likely to acquire, and how that knowledge is connected to their use of language. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and his epistemological view are now referred to as genetic epistemology, and is actively studied today. Piaget also had 3 children himself, and like any psychologist with children, he studied them and tested his theories on them. Furthermore, Piaget served as the Director of the International Bureau of Education from 1929 to 1968.
- {The Language and Thought of the Child}
I've decided to summarize the 1st chapter of The Language and Thought of the Child. This chapter describes the results of an observational study where children were allowed to work and play in a social environment without much restriction. Piaget watched 2 children and the children around them, and observed 8 forms of speech being used by the children: Repetition, monologue, collective monologue, adapted information, criticism, commands (and requests and threats), questions, and answers. The children spoke in monologues 5-15% of the time, and in collective monologues 23-30% of the time. Considering the non-communicative and ego-centric nature of monologues, Piaget concluded that children don't really care about being heard and enjoy talking to themselves. Piaget explained that children even play a "game" with words when they talk to themselves, where words have inherent value and usefulness all on their own, and that words don't need to be applied in a practical setting in order to be valuabe to children. These ideas are all quite common in modern culture, probably due to Piaget's influence, but I still find Piaget's writing to be inspiring.
A major flaw in Piaget's writing is his authoratitve view of communication. Piaget believed that monologues are immature and that adults should not talk to themselves. Piaget does admit that the children do benefit from their monologues, but I guess he sees their simple childish minds as being distinctly different than adults. To be fair, adults are better off engaging in quiet monologues, such as writing a paper, like this. Maybe Piaget saw the similarity between his writing and a monologue, but I'm pretty sure he would argue that they are different things. Other than that, Piaget's writing is palletable and his ideas are justified. I thought the introduction of his book was a bit off topic, since it just talks about language and writing in general. However, the introduction is quite relevant, since the 1st chapter describes the language and thinking of children, and every person starts their life as a child.
- i.e. {Dr. Moes & Dr. Tellinghuisen}'s book
I would say that Piaget's writing connects to Christianity and M & T's 5 themes quite well. I'm going to be looking at his ideas here, especially the general ideas he describes in the beginning of his book and the general results of his studies.
Piaget theorized that younger children were only interested in speaking and "playing" with words because words were useful to them as infants. This means that all speaking, even non-communicative monologues, is based on relationships and important interactions with other people.
Piaget believed that even though the monologues of children look broken and silly, they ultimately benefit from the process of playing with words.
Piaget doesn't really explore this theme, since he focuses on language, and he's not a Chistian.
As limited agents we need to use communication to collect information from other people, and use other people as an extension of ourself. Piaget believed that this was the core, natural, practical reason for communication, and that all other benefits of speech were simply auxilary benefits.
Piaget would argue that we humans seek meaning because we are naturally social and talkative.
END
invariably imagine that they have discovered by themselves what in reality they are only repeating from a model. This seems to be an early thought of Piaget that inspired the theory of constructivism.