Piaget, Teachers and Psychologists

Abstract

One of most obvious and at same time most surprising things about Piaget's work is great interest in it shown by people concerned with education. There are two reasons for wondering at their enthusiasm. One is that Piaget himself was not particularly interested in their subject. True, he directed Institut des Sciences de l'Education in Geneva and true, too, he wrote a book about education (Piaget, 1971). But name of his department was misleading, since its subject was really Psychology or at any rate Child Psychology, and one book only among such a prodigious output is really very small beer. Piaget himself often expressed disdain for most obvious and least sophisticated educational question to be expressed about intellectual development he charted so meticulously-which was how to hurry this development on. He called it the American question, and that was not meant as a compliment. But of course interests can go one way and not other. The fact that Piaget paid little attention to educational questions does not mean that there was nothing of interest in his theory to educationalists. There is, however, a more serious reason for wondering why his impact on education has been so great, and that concerns his view of language. A teacher talks to children and spends a lot of time telling them how to do things. One way and another his or her work is based on idea that someone, who has knowledge and skills, can transmit them to others who have less of them or do not have them at all. Yet in Piaget's view this sort of activity had virtually nothing to do with children's intellectual development. Language seemed to him to depend on cognitive development and to follow it. The child, he argued, learns to express various concepts verbally only as a result of conquering these concepts first. The idea that intellectual development was product of some direct communication from adult to child was anathema to Piaget and his colleagues. He thought it entirely inadequate on its own: it would only work, he argued, if child had somehow managed to arm himself with necessary intellectual structures first. In a word, whenever it is a question of speech or verbal instruction, we tend to start off from implicit postulate that this educational transmission supplies child with instruments of assimilation as such simultaneously with knowledge to be assimilated, forgetting that such instruments cannot be acquired except by means of internal activity, and that all assimilation is a restructuration or a reinvention (Piaget, 1971: p. 39). Where does that leave teacher? Does it not mean that teacher is doomed to be peripheral at best and ineffective at worst? I still find it hard to find a plausible answer to this question and I suspect that at bottom Piaget had little respect for teacher's business. Yet if you look at almost any new programme for teaching science or mathematics to young children, there Piaget tangibly is. His work is cited 251