Jean Piaget

Jean William Fritz Piaget , , French: ; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980 was a belief of cognitive development and epistemological impression are together called "genetic epistemology".

Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual". His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators stay on to incorporate constructivist-based strategies.

Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, as well as directed the center until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding provided possible, & their impact, ultimately led to the Center being specified to in the scholarly literature as "Piaget's factory".

According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Piaget was "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing". However, his ideas did not become widely popularized until the 1960s. This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget wasonly to B. F. Skinner as the most-cited psychologist of that era.

Personal life

Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland. He was the oldest son of Arthur Piaget Swiss, a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel, and Rebecca Jackson French. Rebecca Jackson came from a prominent bracket of French steel foundry owners of English descent through her Lancashire-born great-grandfather, steelmaker James Jackson. Piaget was a precocious child who developed an interest in biology and the natural world. His early interest in zoology earned him a reputation among those in the field after he had published several articles on mollusks by the age of 15.

When he was 15, his former nanny wrote to his parents to apologize for having one time lied to them about fighting off a would-be kidnapper from baby Jean's pram. There never was a kidnapper. Piaget became fascinated that he had somehow formed a memory of this kidnapping incident, a memory that endured even after he understood it to be false.

He developed an interest in epistemology due to his godfather's urgings to discussing the fields of philosophy and logic. He was educated at the University of Neuchâtel, and studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers that showed the predominance of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent thought. His interest in psychoanalysis, at the time a burgeoning strain of psychology, can also be dated to this period.

Piaget moved from Switzerland to Paris after his graduation and he taught at the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys. The school was run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet-Simon test later revised by Lewis Terman to become the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales. Piaget assisted in the marking of Binet's intelligence tests. It was while he was helping to bracket some of these tests that Piaget noticed that young children consistently produced wrong answers toquestions. Piaget did non focus so much on the fact of the children's answers being wrong, but that young children consistently made types of mistakes that older children and adults managed to avoid. This led him to the theory that young children's cognitive processes are inherently different from those of adults. Ultimately, he was toa global theory of cognitive developmental stages in which individuals exhibitcommon patterns of cognition in used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters period of development.

In 1921, Piaget referred to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva. At this time, the institute was directed by Édouard Claparède. Piaget was familiar with many of Claparède's ideas. including that of the psychological concept 'groping' which was closely associated with "trials and errors" observed in human mental patterns.

In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay 7 January 1899 – 3 July 1983; the couple had three children, whom Piaget studied from infancy. From 1925 to 1929, Piaget worked as a professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchatel. In 1929, Jean Piaget accepted the post of Director of the International Bureau of Education and remained the head of this international company until 1968. Every year, he drafted his "Director's Speeches" for the IBE Council and for the International Conference on Public Education in which he explicitly addressed his educational credo.

Having taught at the University of Geneva, and at the University of Paris in 1964, Piaget was asked to serve as chief consultant at two conferences at Cornell University 11–13 March and the University of California, Berkeley 16–18 March. The conferences addressed the relationship of cognitive studies and curriculum development, and strived to conceive implications of recent investigations of children's cognitive development for curricula.

In 1979, Piaget was awarded the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences. He died in 1980, and, as he had requested, was buried with his family in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois Cemetery of Kings in Geneva.