Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) was a Swiss psychologist who was the first to make a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children. Many people believe that he was the major figure in 20th-century developmental psychology.
Piaget’s early interests were in zoology; by 15, his publications on mollusks had gained him a reputation among European zoologists. At the University of Neuchâtel, he studied zoology and philosophy, receiving his doctorate in 1918 in both disciplines. Shortly thereafter, however, he became interested in psychology, combining his biological training with his interest in epistemology. He first went to Zurich, where he studied under Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler, and then he began two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1919.
In Paris, Pierre Jean Piaget devised and administered reading tests to school children, and became interested in the types of errors they made. This led him to explore the reasoning process in these young children. By 1921 he had begun to publish his findings; the same year brought him back to Switzerland, where he was appointed director of the L’Institut J.J. Rousseau in Geneva. In 1925-1929, he was a professor at the University of Neuchâtel, and in 1929 he joined the faculty of the University of Geneva as professor of child psychology. He remained there until his death.
In 1955, he established the International Centre of Genetic Epistemology in Geneva and became its director. His interests included exploring scientific thought, sociology, and psychology, which are all fields of study with a lot of potential for understanding the world around us.
In more than 50 books and monographs over his long career, Piaget continued to develop the theme he had first discovered in Paris, that the mind of the child evolves through a series of set stages to adulthood. Piaget’s developmental stages caused a reconsideration of older ideas about the child, learning, and education. His findings still remain just as significant as they were all these years later.
Among Piaget’s major works available in English are “Le Langage et la pensée chez l’enfant” (1923), “Jugement et le raisonnement chez l’enfant” (1924), and “La Naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant” (1948). He has written a series of books on different subjects, including children’s conceptions of time, space, physical causality, movement and speed, and the world in general – dying with a great legacy on his name in 1980.
