[分享] 每日一星！儿童心理学家：让 皮亚杰

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Child Psychologist: Jean Piaget

[I]He found the secrets of human learning and knowledge hidden behind the cute and seemingly illogical notions of children. [/I]

Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist, spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and poring over(研究) reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succinctly, that children don’t think like grownups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.”


Piaget’s insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. By the end of a wide-ranging and remarkably prolific research career that spanned nearly 75 years---from his first scientific publication at age 10 to work still in progress when he died at 84--- Piaget had developed several new fields of science: developmental psychology, cognitive theory and what came to called genetic epistemology. Although not an educational reformer, he championed(倡导) a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today’s education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the displacement of stories of “noble savages” and “cannibals” by modern anthropology. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously.

rainlannyUID: 68597

蛋蛋，上面那个黄色的以后不要用了。看不清，很晃眼

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Others who shared this respect for children---John Dewey(美国哲学家、教育家和心理学家，实用主义哲学学派创立者之一，机能主义心理学先驱，实用主义教育的倡导者) in the U.S., Maria Montessori(意大利女教育家、医师，创办“儿童之家(1907),提出蒙台梭利教育法，强调使儿童的潜能得到自有发展) in Italy and Paulo Freire in Brazil--- fought harder for immediate change in the schools, but Piaget’s influence on education is deeper and more pervasive. He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge(as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge---little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world. And though he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud or even B.F. Skinner（1904～1990美国心理学家，新行为主义代表人物之一）, his contribution to psychology may be longer lasting . As computers and the Internet give children greater autonomy to explore ever larger digital worlds, the ideas he pioneered become ever more relevant.

The core of Piaget is his belief that looking carefully at how knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. Whether this has in fact led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, controversial. In the past decade Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current fashion of viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those, like me, who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the difference between what the baby brings and what the adult has is so immense that the new discoveries do not significantly reduce the gap but only increasing the mystery.