Droz teaches at the University of Lausanne. Rahmy is a school psychologist. Both worked with Piaget. ‘There exists only one way’, they remark, ‘of being introduced to Piaget’s thought. It is to read the texts he has written’.
As early as the eighteenth century, it had been sensed that people did not have quite the same ‘brain’ as little people. In other words: the intelligence of the child differs from that of the adult, not only from a quantitative point of view, but also qualitatively.
‘Much research has already helped to confirm this point of view. But Piaget goes further: he discovers the differences and analyses their consequences for the view of the world and the explanation of physical phenomena. He tries to sketch the world of the child by detaching himself, as much as possible, from the norms of the adult’ (Understanding Piaget).
During the twenties, Jean Piaget undertook the analysis of the different developmental stages of children’s thought. He notes that this development is affected by ‘successive balances and stratifications’. He then divides the genesis of the brain into four ‘slices’ or ‘stages’: the sensory-motor stage, the ‘egocentric’ stage, the ‘social’ stage, and the stage of formal operations. Alongside this, he develops an appropriate investigative method, consisting at once of experimental psychology and psychiatric interviewing.
‘He is not content simply to observe, he provokes the child’s behaviour with appropriate situations in order to understand, as far as possible, the inner mechanisms (schemes or patterns) ruling child behaviour.
In the first two years of his life, the child acquires a predominantly practical intelligence: he finds that some objects break, while others bend or tear. There is sucking of the thumb, and movement of objects.
Contrary to what the partisans of classical empirical (‘associationalist’) psychology thought, the earliest knowledge that the little person has of the world is therefore not due solely to its perceptions. But also, and above all, the discoveries he makes by acting upon things, combining them, articulating them, transforming them. These ‘activities’ (in the ‘Piagetian’ sense of the word) teach him that certain properties of things are linked to the actions that are exercised upon them.
At the age of two, and up to the age of seven, the child enters the first stage of concrete operations. It learns the difference between the home, the street, and the school. But he confuses the objects contained in these different sets. He creates ‘symbols’: the stick becomes a rifle, cane, or telescope. He makes analogical comparisons: ‘a piece of grass contained in its seed is like a pair of glasses in their case’. The cause-and-effect relationship is misunderstood. ‘How does the bicycle work?’ With the wheels. And the wheels? Because they’re round. But how do they turn? ‘It’s the bicycle that turns them’.
The child brings everything back to him. It takes a long time to understand that ‘Spot’ is also called ‘dog’, and that the grocer may be a ‘monsieur’ without necessarily being a ‘dad’.
Substance, Volume, and Weight
It is in the field of ‘spontaneous geometry’ that this type of reasoning is most striking. Droz and Rahmy cite an example. ‘It consists in presenting to the child a square placed on one of its sides, then to make it undergo a rotation of 45 degrees so that it rests on the point. The child is then asked if the object is the same. All the young subjects (up to the age of six or at least seven), or almost all of them, claim that the square placed on the point is not a square, and that it is not even the same individual object’.
Identical results are obtained by deforming a ball of modelling clay, or by transferring an equal quantity of liquid into different vessels. The child does not establish the ratio that could exist simultaneously between size, volume, substance, weight, and so forth.
At around seven or eight years old, the child enters the operative period properly speaking. Under the influence of the school and group games, he is ‘socialised’: his conception of relations with others is more relative, less egocentric. Causes are identified. The child realises that ‘certain properties of a situation or object are invariable in relation to the action which is imposed on them’. If he transfers the contents of a champagne flute to a mug of beer, he understands that the volume of the liquid remains the same ‘because nothing has been added or removed’. He also distinguishes categories, and admits that if ‘all ducks are birds’, then ‘(only) some birds are ducks’.
The notion of conservation of weight is acquired at nine or ten years; the notion of conservation of substance, towards eight years, that of conservation of volume, towards twelve years.
Finally, in a last stage, starting at eleven or twelve years, the child gains access to the notion of abstraction. He represents objects or situations that are not available for immediate action.
‘Then we see proportions appear’, writes Jean Piaget, ‘as well as the ability to reason and represent according to two systems of references at the same time, and the structures of mechanical balance’ (Problems of Genetic Psychology).516 The child may appreciate, for example, the relative movement of a snail on a board moving in the opposite direction. ‘He becomes capable of operating on propositions and hypotheses’, not only on objects. Finally, he arrives at a hypothetico-deductive style of reasoning, such as: ‘If my hypothesis is correct, then such object must react in such a way to such manipulation’.
An Adapted Teaching
This is, of course, a typical pattern. In practice, there may be variations, depending on location, in the speed and duration of development. Piaget reports that in Martinique, he found up to four years of ‘delay’ in the answers obtained for his tests. ‘It was, however, children enrolled according to the French primary school curriculum, which goes toward the certificate of studies. In spite of this, the little Martiniquans are up to four years late in acquiring the notions of conservation, deduction, and sequencing’ (Problems of Genetic Psychology).
Thinking, Piaget reminds us, is given by heredity only in the form of a potentiality. The brain at birth is neither a ‘blank slate’ nor the receptacle of a universal ‘reason’ equally distributed among individuals. The psyche constructs itself by a series of reciprocal assimilations and adaptations between the individual’s innate dispositions and the exterior environment. It does not emerge in a single stroke, but in stages. It flourishes like a flower.
Piagetian concepts prove particularly fruitful when they are related to pedagogy. It is indeed evident that teaching must be adapted to the different stages of child mental development. We can therefore conceive of programs that are ‘sensory’, ‘conventional’, ‘intuitive’, ‘concrete’, ‘rational’, and so forth. Piaget himself has spoken for an ‘active pedagogy’ taking into consideration the child as it is, not as one would wish it to be. ‘It would be of the highest interest’, he wrote in Psychology and Pedagogy (1969),517 ‘for those responsible for directing educators to be in possession of objective studies on the relations between social life and education’.
‘This adapted teaching requires that the adult world should not be brutally imposed on the child, but that the child should be progressively lead as it gradually passes through the stages of its development. This theory highlights the errors of the hyper-authoritarian method (‘we shall train them!’), without falling into the exaggeration of ‘child value’ as practiced by Alphonse Ferrière (L’école modern française, 1922; L’école active, 1947–59)518 or Célestin Freinet (Pour l’école du peuple, Maspero, 1971).519
Descriptive for children, Piagetian psychology becomes explanatory for adults. It helps us to better understand the mechanism of the Child’s mental operations.
Piaget insists in particular on the ‘unconscious cogenitive’, on the fact that the genesis of thought is not clearly perceived by the subject. The adult, in fact, ‘forgot’ that his ‘logical’ actions originally come from the interiorisation of operations that were at first material and concrete. The structures of his mind have been balanced, ‘crystallised’. To him they seem
to have been there the whole time. He imagines, quite wrongly, that they correspond, not to a practical experience that he shares with his kin, but to logical necessities — that which is given for a priori understanding. He thus believes that his vision of the world reflects the absolute reality of things.
Adaptation
Such a mechanism explains why mental development can be ‘arrested’ at an earlier stage. Piaget quotes Spencer, who in his Traité de sociologie520 recounts ‘the story of a lady who was traveling with a long suitcase rather than a square suitcase, because she thought that the dresses weighed less when spread out than when folded’.
‘For Piaget’, Droz and Rahmy conclude, ‘intelligence essentially appears as an activity of an organism that allows the subject to adapt his behavior (including his knowledge and his thoughts) to the modifications of the environment’. ‘Intelligence’, he writes, ‘constitutes the state of equilibrium towards which all the successive adaptations of a sensory-motor and cognitive order tend, as well as all the assimilative and accommodating exchanges between the organism and the environment’. (The Psychology of Intelligence, 1967).521 This definition is accepted by most specialists, who connect intelligence to three essential qualities: the ability to adapt to ever-changing situations, the approximation of the real, and the aptitude for abstraction (logical and formal operations).
In Insights and Illusions of Philosophy (1965),522 Jean Piaget vigorously denounces the ‘false ideal of a supra-scientific knowledge’. He also asserts the autonomy of genetic psychology, a positive science auxiliary to epistemology, against literary and philosophical currents (Bergsonism, phenomenology, existentialism), which would like to make it a mere appendix to philosophy.
Bertrand Russell said: ‘Science is what we know. Philosophy is what we do not know yet’. With psychology, we know.
*
Lire Piaget, by Rémy Droz and Maryvonne Rahmy. Charles-Dessart, Brussels, (distr. Sedim), 244 pages.523
Epistémologie des sciences de l’homme, by Jean Piaget. Gallimard, 380 pages.524
Problèmes de psychologie génétique, by Jean Piaget. Denoël-Gonthier, 174 pages.525
Orientations actuelles de le psychopédagogie, by Jehanne Deloncle. Privat, 150 pages.526
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There are many books on Jean Piaget, notably those by G. Lerbet (Piaget. Ed. Universitaires, 1970) and P. C. Richmond (An Introduction to Piaget. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970). The most recent we owe to Jean-Claude Bringuier (Conversations libres avec Jean Piaget. Laffont, 1977), who brings together a series of interviews conducted in 1969 and 1975–76. Here, in a relaxed and lively manner, Jean Piaget explains the principal aspects of his work.
In recent years, Piaget has devoted himself above all to ‘genetic epistemology’, which is ‘the study of the successive states of a science in the function of its development’. This new discipline proposes to examine the history of the sciences, to reveal its roots and formative mechanisms ‘up to the prescientific or infrascientific field of common knowledge’. In other words, it seeks to identify the morphisms (or correspondences preserving structure) that can exist between the individual development of intelligence and the history of scientific progress. One of the collaborators of Jean Piaget, the physicist Rolando Garcia, declares in this connection: ‘The intention of genetic epistemology is to give a sort of description and global explanation of knowledge. This means finding the unity between the human being as a biological being, the child and current, unsophisticated man, and scientific man — to find the unity of development not through a unifying, reductive theory, but through the discovery of common mechanisms’.
The works of the Centre for Genetic Epistemology (33 volumes published between 1957 and 1975) are published by the Presses universitaires de France (PUF), in a collection directed by Jean Piaget. They have also published an Epistémologie des sciences de l’homme (Tendances principales de la recherche dans les sciences sociales et humaines, vol. 1. Unesco-Mouton, 1970),527 corresponding to the first three chapters of a systematic study of the human sciences.
Piagetian concepts have begun to provide the substance of many psychological tests: they are already applied to inter-ethnic psychometry. These tests place the accent on the quality of the reasoning more than the veracity of the answers. In Canada, the Institute of Psychology at the University of Montreal has been working for some years in this vein (cf. ‘Piaget et le QI’, in Psychologie, February 1973). Cf. also the paper by Read D. Tuddenham from Berkeley University (‘A Piagetian Test of Cognitive Development’) at the Symposium on Intelligence by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (8 May 1969).
Pedagogical Responsibility
‘To dominate a child’, says Dr. Dreikurs, ‘is to impose on him what he must do and have him revolt. To be firm is to choose what you want to do, and have him execute it’.
A tenacious propaganda tends to assimilate relations between generations to a dialectical relationship of the Hegelian ‘master-slave’ type. The break-up of family structures, the challenging of authority and hierarchy, the degradation of the university, and the (ideological and commercial) myth of the ‘child-king’ accentuate the unrest and add to the anguish of parents.
Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs, eighty years of age, frameless bifocals, finely trimmed mustache, is a specialist in child psychology. Born in Vienna, he was the organizer of the first Austrian Mental Hygiene Committee. In 1937, he moved to the United States. He teaches psychiatry at the Chicago Medical School.
This old-fashioned ‘Herr Doktor’ is an advocate of avant-garde pedagogy. ‘Authority is dead’, he says. ‘And yet’, he adds, ‘resignation is more intolerable than ever’.
Educating Parents
Neo-pedagogy, nourished by psychoanalysis and behaviourism, practically reigned supreme in the early fifties. Launched in America before establishing itself in Europe, it has produced a generation of inadequate, ‘neo-communists’ and hippies.
Pampered children of the post-war period, protestors fail to understand that life does not show them the solicitude to which they have been accustomed. Inadequately armed for competition, they react according to the classic pattern: revolt and secession. Secluded away from the world, they believe to be able to solve collectively problems that they have been unable to face on their own. They seek to replace by the group (the ‘community’) the family which they lacked.
Apparently struck with amnesia regarding their own childhood, parents, for their part, have a hard time understanding their offspring. Clashes result. It is a vicious circle.
‘Jerome, five years old, opposes everything his mother asks. He breaks his toys, his plates, and his furniture in violent fits of anger. His mother is the very model of someone who fulfils her obligations. The father, who hates the drama, yields to the aggravated pressure of the mother in order to have peace’. The diagnosis of Dr. Dreikurs: ‘Jerome observes and admires the power of his mother. He feels that the force is of prime importance, and he tries to obtain a similar power. Using anger as a means of asserting himself, he imitates his mother. She thinks that by punishing him, she has the upper hand, without realising that the next manifestation of immoderate conduct will be a revenge, and the beginning of another round in the fight for power’.
To ‘avoid the scuffle’, most adults are ready to evade their responsibilities. Dr. Dreikurs takes them to task. ‘Like all children’, he writes, ‘the parents need to be educated’.
From birth, the child observes his surroundings. And what he learns first is the weaknesses of those who lecture him. Very quickly, he knows where to find the chinks in their armour.
The parents, unconscious, commit the first error: to speak (whether positively or negatively) of children in their presence — under the naive pretext that they are ‘too small to understand’. Repository of attention, pet sayings, barrages of kisses, hugs and tickles, the dear little one triumphs. He is put on a pedestal. When he grows up, he will hardly understand that the star is be
ing taken away from him, and his anger will be deferred to those around him.
Divide and conquer: the child, little king, learns this by himself. He shelters behind the weakness of the father to avoid the reprimands of the mother. Or vice versa. ‘Look at what your daughter has done’. The child provokes discord and benefits from it.
The problem here is not so much whether it is necessary to use firmness but to learn to avoid using it at the wrong time. The worst thing is to get nervous. ‘If we explode abruptly’, says Dr. Dreikurs, ‘our children will listen to us only when we are violent with them’. (‘If you get in such a state about me’, they will think, ‘then I am just as strong as you’).
‘Mother surprised Laurent, four years old, in the process of climbing on the kitchen table to get sweets: “Not now”, she says, “it’s almost time for lunch”. The child insists, starts to cry, and stamps his foot. Anger intensifies. “Laurent, stop! I’ll give you one, but, for heaven’s sake, stop screaming”. Conclusion: Mother first refused, but Laurent forced her to give in. He has thus won, and his confidence in his own power strengthens’.
The Courage to Say ‘No’
To yield once is to yield always — for firmness asserted late or rarely will appear unfair. The ‘good mother’, under these conditions, quickly became a slave. She is brought easily under the (moral) whip, which the dear little one uses without any difficulty. The Hegelian relation is then reversed.
Omegas dominate alphas. The ‘anti-authoritarian’ education of children by parents means not less than the hyper-authoritarian education of the parents by the children.
The ‘boyfriend style’ is based on an illusion: it supposes that the child has a mode of understanding things that is actually completely foreign to him. In this way of educating their progeny, parents actually put themselves beneath their children: they are the ones who regress in mental age. And most frequently, the effects of the family environment reinforce those of heredity. The parents speak to their children like they do to little dogs, and give them ridiculous diminutives. ‘Baby language’ and tickles. Nothing in all this creates strong souls. (‘I like strength’, said Stendhal, ‘that strength that can be shown by an ant as much as an elephant.’) Without character, intelligence is nothing.
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