Zitat des Tages von Jean Piaget:
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
All morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules.
In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.
Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'
The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.
During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle.
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.
Before playing with his equals, the child is influenced by his parents. He is subjected from his cradle to a multiplicity of regulations, and even before language he becomes conscious of certain obligations.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
Our problem, from the point of view of psychology and from the point of view of genetic epistemology, is to explain how the transition is made from a lower level of knowledge to a level that is judged to be higher.
From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.
In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
Play is the work of childhood.
Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
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.
The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.
The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.
I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct.
To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.
