Professors and Practitioners Must Build To-gether.’’ Journal of Physical Education, Recre-ation and Dance 68(4):25–33.

Murray Mitchell

PHYSICAL EDUCATION:ADAPTED

See: Adapted Physical Education.

PIAGET, JEAN (1896–1980)

Director of the Institute of Educational Science inGeneva and professor of experimental psychology atthe University of Geneva, Jean Piaget was the mostinfluential developmental psychologist of the twenti-eth century. Many of Piaget’s concepts and researchmethods have become so much a part of the conven-tional wisdom and practice that psychologists areoften unaware of their origin. The stages of develop-ment that Piaget observed and conceptualized aregiven extended treatment in every introductory psy-chology and developmental psychology textbook. Inaddition, much of contemporary research on infan-cy grows directly out of Piaget’s innovative studiesof his own three infants. Moreover, a great deal ofpresent day research and theory regarding adoles-cence starts from Piaget’s demonstration of the ap-pearance of new, higher level, mental abilities duringthis age period. In these and in many other ways,Piaget’s research and theory continue to be a power-ful stimulus in many different fields and areas of in-vestigation.

Piaget’s work, however, has had an impact onother disciplines as well. The contemporary empha-sis upon constructivism in education, for example,stems directly from Piaget’s theory of intellectual de-velopment. According to Piaget the child does notcopy reality, but rather constructs it. Reality is de-velopmentally relative; it is always a joint product ofthe child’s developing mental abilities and his or herexperiences with the world. Piaget’s research andtheory has also had considerable impact upon psy-chiatry. His description of the intellectual stages ofdevelopment has provided a very important comple-ment to the psychosexual stages of development out-lined by the Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud.In these, and in many other ways, the power of Pia-get’s work continues to be felt in many diverse fields.

Jean Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.His father was a classics professor at the Universityof Neuchâtel while his mother was a deeply devoutChristian. In his autobiography, Piaget suggests thatthe ongoing conflict between his father’s scientificbeliefs and his mother’s spiritual convictions con-tributed to his theory of mental development. Hecame to regard the development of intelligence asmotivated by the progressive resolution of conflict-ing ideas. Be that as it may, Piaget showed his geniusearly. At the age of fourteen he published his first sci-entific paper, his observations of an albino sparrow.He also became, thanks to the mentorship of the cu-rator of the Neuchâtel natural history museum, astudent of mollusks. He began experimenting withcrustaceans and publishing his findings in the bio-logical journals. These articles were so well receivedthat he was offered the curatorship of a natural his-tory museum in another Swiss canton. Piaget, how-ever, had to refuse because he had not yet graduatedfrom high school.

Once at the university, Piaget took courses inboth philosophy and biology and struggled to findsome way to reconcile his philosophical interestswith his commitment to science. He hit upon aunique solution in an unexpected place. After receiv-ing his doctorate, Piaget explored a number of dif-ferent professions including psychiatry. Heeventually took a position in Paris, translating someof the intelligence tests created by the English psy-chologist, Sir Cyril Burt, into French. As part of thisendeavor, it was necessary for Piaget to test a num-ber of children in order to ensure that his transla-tions had not made the items easier or more difficultthan they were for English children of comparableage. While administering these tests, Piaget becamefascinated with the children’s wrong answers. ToPiaget, these wrong answers did not seem random.Rather they appeared to be generated by a systematicway of seeing things that was not wrong, but simplyreflected a different world view than that held byadults.

Piaget was fascinated by his unexpected discov-ery that children’s perception of reality was notlearned from adults, as had heretofore been as-sumed, but was constructed. Children’s conceptionof the world, Piaget reasoned, was different than thatof adults because their thought processes were dif-ferent. Piaget assumed that he would pursue thisproblem, the development of children’s thinking, fora few years and then move on to other things. In-

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stead, this pursuit of the ways in which children con-struct reality, became the foundation of a lifelongprofessional career. Piaget came to realize that thestudy of the development of children’s adaptivethought and action, of their intelligence, was a wayof pursuing both his philosophical and his scientificinterests.

One field of philosophy is epistemology, thestudy of how people come to know the world. Mostphilosophers approach this topic by means of intro-spection and logical analysis. Piaget, however, be-lieved that he could put epistemological questions tothe test by studying the development of thought andaction in children. Accordingly Piaget created hisown new discipline with its own methods and prob-lems. The field was genetic epistemology, the studyof child development as a means of answering epis-temological questions. Piaget’s career exploration ofgenetic epistemology can be roughly divided intofour different stages.

Stage 1: The Sociological Model of Development

During this first stage, roughly corresponding to the1920s, Piaget investigated children’s heretofore un-explored conceptions of the world, the hidden sideof children’s minds. To further this exploration Pia-get made use of a combination of psychological andclinical methods that he described as the semiclinicalinterview. He began with a standardized question,but followed up with nonstandard questions thatwere prompted by the child’s answer. In order to getwhat Piaget called children’s ‘‘spontaneous convic-tions’’ he often asked questions that the children nei-ther expected nor anticipated. In his study ofchildren’s conception of the world, for example, heasked children whether a stone was alive and wheredreams came from. He made a comparative study ofchildren’s answers and found that for these and forsimilar questions there was a gradual progressionfrom intuitive to scientific and socially acceptable re-sponses.

During this early period, Piaget published TheLanguage and Thought of the Child, The Child’s Con-ception of the World, The Child’s Conception of Physi-cal Causality, and The Moral Judgment of the Child.Each of these books was highly original and theymade Piaget world famous before he was thirty. Inthese books he elaborated his first theory of develop-ment, which postulated the mental development wasfueled by a social dynamic. He proposed that chil-dren moved from a position of egocentrism (a fail-

ure to take the other person’s point of view intoaccount) to sociocentrism (the recognition that oth-ers see the world differently than they do). Childrenmoved from the egocentric to the sociocentric posi-tion thanks to social interaction and the challenge toyounger children’s ideas by the ideas of those chil-dren who were more advanced. Piaget made it clear,however, that the young children’s egocentric ideaswere not wrong, but merely different from those ofthe older children. Egocentric ideas are developmen-tally appropriate for young children, if not for olderones.

Stage 2: The Biological Model of IntellectualDevelopment

In 1928 Piaget married one of his graduate studentsand started a family in the 1930s. Having his own in-fant children set the stage for the second phase ofPiaget’s work, the exploration of the development ofintelligence in infants. During this period, Piagetstudied his own three offspring. The semiclinical in-terview was clearly not of much use with infants whocould not talk. Piaget, therefore, invented a numberof ingenious experiments to test the infant’s knowl-edge about the world. For example, he placed a clothover a toy that the infant was playing with to seewhether or not the baby would try to remove thecloth to recover the toy. If the baby removed thecloth this would be evidence that he or she had somemental representation of the toy. If the baby did notremove the cloth, but merely cried in frustration,this would be evidence that the infant had not yet at-tained representational thought.

During this second period of his work, Piagetelaborated a biological model of intellectual devel-opment, which he combined with the sociologicalmodel of the earlier period. He now described intel-ligence as having two closely interrelated facets. Oneof these, carried over from the earlier period, was thecontent of children’s thinking. The other, new to thisperiod, was the process of intellectual activity. Piagetnow introduced a truly powerful idea, namely, thatthe process of thinking could be regarded as an ex-tension of the biological process of adaptation.

He argued, for example, that the child whosucked on anything and everything in his or herreach was engaging in an act of assimilation, compa-rable to the assimilation of food by the digestive sys-tem. Just as the digestive system transforms a varietyof foodstuffs into the nutriments needed by thebody, so the infant transforms every object into an

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object to be sucked. At much higher level, wheneverone classifies an object, say a dog, he or she in effectassimilates this exemplar to their more general dogconcept. In so doing the particular dog is trans-formed into the universal, conceptual dog. At allstages of development, therefore, whenever onetransforms the world to meet individual needs orconceptions, one is, in effect, assimilating it.

Piaget also observed that his infant children notonly transformed some stimuli to conform to theirown mental structures but also modified some oftheir mental structures to meet the demands of theenvironment. He called this facet of adaptation ac-commodation. At the biological level the body ac-commodates when, for example, its blood vesselsconstrict in response to cold and expand in responseto heat. Piaget observed similar accommodations atthe behavioral and conceptual levels. The young in-fant engages primarily in reflex actions, such as suck-ing the thumb or grasping. But shortly thereafter theinfant will grasp some object and proceed to put thatin his or her mouth. In this instance the child hasmodified his or her reflex response to accommodatean external object into the reflex action. That is tosay, the infant’s instinctual thumbsucking reflex hasbeen adapted to objects in the environment. Piagetregarded this behavioral adaptation as a model forwhat happens at higher intellectual levels as well.Whenever one learns new facts, values, or skills, heor she is, in effect, modifying mental structures tomeet the demands of the external world.

In Piaget’s view, assimilation and accommoda-tion are the invariant processes of intellectual pro-cessing and are present throughout life.Furthermore, because the two are often in conflictthey provide the power for intellectual development.The child’s first tendency is to assimilate, but whenthis is not possible, he or she must accommodate. Itis the constant tension between assimilation and ac-commodation and the need for some form of equi-librium between them that triggers intellectualgrowth. For example, in the ‘‘hiding the toy experi-ment’’ described above, the six-month-old infantsimply cried while the one-year-old infant lifted thecloth to reveal the hidden object. This initial upset,and failure of assimilation, thus led to the infant’sconstruction of a mental image of the object. Thisnew construction allows the child to solve the prob-lem and remove the cloth from the toy. At each levelof development, the failure of assimilation leads toa new accommodations that result in a new equilib-

rium that prepares for yet another level of disequi-librium.

Piaget published the results of these infantstudies in three books, The Origins of Intelligence inthe Child, The Construction of Reality in the Child,and Play Dreams and Imitation. These books contin-ue to stimulate a wide range of investigations intothe developing abilities of infants.

Stage 3: The Elaboration of the Logical Model ofIntellectual Development

During the third period of his work, from the 1940sthrough the 1960s, Piaget explored the developmentof many different physical and mathematical con-cepts in children and adolescents. To explore thephysical and mathematical conceptions of childrenand adolescents, Piaget returned to the semiclinicalinterview, but in modified form. He decided that theway to test children’s level of conceptual develop-ment was to challenge their understanding of con-servation, that is, their understanding that anobject’s physical or mathematical properties do notchange despite a change in its appearance. Piagetbased this methodology on the fact that scientificprogress occurs when judgments of reason win outover judgments based upon appearance. The discov-ery of the roundness of the earth is a good example.The ancients believed that the world was flat. It wasonly from later observations and reasoning aboutthe disappearance of ships on the horizon and theshadow of the earth on the moon that the perceptionof flatness could be overcome.

To test children’s understanding of conserva-tion, Piaget presented children with a wide array oftasks in which the child had to make a judgment onthe basis of either perception or reason. Only whenthe child made his or her judgment on the basis ofreason was the child said to have attained conserva-tion. For example, in his studies of children’s con-ception of number, Piaget confronted children withtwo rows of six pennies, one spread apart so that itwas longer than the other. Young children judge thelonger row to have more pennies, while older chil-dren judge both rows to have the same amount.Older children have attained the conservation ofnumber while younger children have not.

With this conservation methodology, Piaget andhis longtime colleague, Barbel Inhelder, exploredhow children constructed their concepts of number,space, time, geometry, speed, and much more. In

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this third phase of his work, Piaget introduced a log-ical model to explain children’s attainment of con-servation in different domains and at different agelevels. It is this logical model of intellectual develop-ment for which he is perhaps best known. Piaget ar-gued that intelligence develops in a series of stagesthat are related to age and that are progressive in thesense that each is a necessary prerequisite of the next.There is no skipping of stages. In addition, he con-tended that each stage was characterized by a set ofmental operations that are logical in nature but varyin complexity. At each stage of development thechild constructs a view of reality in keeping with theoperations at that age period. At the next stage, how-ever, with the attainment of new mental abilities thechild has to reconstruct the concepts formed at theearlier level in keeping with his or her new mentalabilities. In effect, therefore, Piaget conceived of in-tellectual development as an upward expanding spi-ral wherein the child must constantly reconstruct theideas formed at an earlier level with new, higherorder concepts acquired at the next level.

The first stage, infancy or the first two years oflife, Piaget described as the sensori-motor period. Inthe first two years of life, the baby constructs ele-mentary concepts of space, time, and causality butthese are at the visual, auditory, tactual, and motoriclevel, and do not go beyond the here and now. At thenext stage of development, the pre-operational level,children acquire the symbolic function and are ableto represent their experience. Children now begin touse words and symbols to convey their experienceand to go beyond the immediate. Concepts of space,time, and causality, for example, begin to be under-stood with terms like now and later, as well as dayand night. Once the child’s thought moves from thesensori-motor to the symbolic level, it has muchmore breadth and depth.

By the age of six or seven children attain a newset of mental abilities that Piaget termed concrete op-erations, which resemble the operations of arithme-tic and which lift school-age children to a whole newplane of thinking. Concrete operations enable youngchildren to reason in a syllogistic way. That may bethe reason the ancients called these years the age ofreason. Concrete operations enable children to dealwith verbal rules and that is why formal educationis usually begun at about this time. Following rulesis in effect reasoning syllogistically. Consider theclassic model of the syllogism.

All men are mortal.

Socrates is a man.

Therefore Socrates is mortal.

This is the same form of reasoning the child mustemploy if he or she is to follow the rule that says‘‘when two vowels go walking, the first one does thetalking.’’

When two vowels go walking the first onedoes the talking.

In the word ate there are two vowels and thefirst is an a.

In this word, a does the talking.

Concrete operations enable young children to con-struct their conceptions of space, time, number, andcausality on a higher quantitative plane. It is duringthe elementary years that children are able to learnclock and calendar time, map and geographicalspace, and experimental causality.

At about the age of eleven or twelve young peo-ple develop yet a higher level of mental operationsthat Piaget labeled formal. These operations are for-mal in the sense that they are no longer tied to thehere and now and are abstract in the sense that theycan be in conflict with reality. For example, if youask a younger child to imagine a world in whichsnow was black and to guess what color, in thatworld, Mickey Mouse’s ears would be, the childwould have trouble saying they were white. Adoles-cents who have attained formal operations have notrouble with this problem. Formal operations enableyoung people to understand celestial space, histori-cal time, and multivariable causality. They can con-struct ideals, think in terms of possibilities, and dealwith multiple variables at the same time. Formal op-erations move young people to a new plane ofthought, which is on a level with adult thinking.

Stage 4: The Study of Figurative Thought

During the last stage of Piaget’s work, which lasteduntil his death in 1980, Piaget explored what hecalled the figurative facets of intelligence. By figurativePiaget meant those aspects of intelligence such asperception and memory that were not entirely logi-cal. Logical concepts are completely reversible in thesense that one can always get back to the startingpoint. The logical addition of concepts, such as‘‘boys plus girls equals children,’’ can be undone bylogical subtraction, such as ‘‘children minus boysequals girls’’ or ‘‘children minus girls equals boys.’’But perceptual concepts cannot be manipulated in

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this way. The figure and ground of a picture, for ex-ample, cannot be separated because contours cannotbe separated from the forms they outline. Memorytoo is figurative in that it is never completely revers-ible. Piaget and Inhelder published books on percep-tion, memory and other figurative processes such aslearning during this last period of his work.

Conclusion

Jean Piaget is clearly the giant of developmental psy-chology. His experimental paradigms have been rep-licated in almost every country in the world and withquite extraordinary comparability of results. Piaget’sobservations, then, are among the hardiest, if not thehardiest, data in all of psychology. No other researchparadigm has received such extensive cross-culturalconfirmation. In the early twenty-first century therehas been a tendency of investigators to dismiss Pia-get’s work as passé. This would be a mistake. Whileit is important to challenge Piaget and to build uponthe foundation he has provided, it would be wrongto discount his work without having a comparabledatabase on which to found such a rejection. Indeed,the opposite is more likely the case, namely, that thevalue of much of Piaget’s work both for develop-mental psychology education and for other disci-plines is yet to be fully realized.

See also: Learning Theory, subentry on Con-structivist Approach.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beard, Ruth M. 1983. An Outline of Piaget’s Devel-opmental Psychology. Boston: Routledge andKegan Paul.

Evans, Richard I. 1973. Jean Piaget: The Man andHis Ideas. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Kamii, Constance. 1993. Physical Knowledge inPreschool Education: Implications of Piaget’s The-ory. New York: Teacher’s College Press.

Piaget, Jean. 1926. The Language and Thought ofthe Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, Jean. 1929. The Child’s Conception of theWorld. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

Piaget, Jean. 1948. The Moral Judgment of theChild, trans. M. Gabain. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Piaget, Jean. 1950. The Psychology of Intelligence.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Piaget, Jean. 1951. Play Dreams and Imitation inChildhood. New York: Norton.

Piaget, Jean. 1952. The Origins of Intelligence in theChild. New York: International UniversitiesPress.

Piaget, Jean. 1970. Science of Education and the Psy-chology of the Child. New York: Orion.

Piaget, Jean, and Inhelder, Barbel. 1958. TheGrowth of Logical Thinking from Childhood toAdolescence. New York: Basic Books.

Piaget, Jean, and Inhelder, B. 1971. Mental Imag-ery in the Child. London: Routledge and KeganPaul.

David Elkind

PLATO (427?–347 B.C.E.)

Plato (427?–347 b.c.e.) was a prominent Athenianphilosopher who posed fundamental questionsabout education, human nature, and justice.

A student of the famous philosopher Socrates,Plato left Athens upon his mentor’s death in 399b.c.e. After traveling to other parts of Greece, Italy,and Sicily, Plato returned to Athens in 387 b.c.e. andfounded a school of mathematics and philosophycalled the Academy, which became the most promi-nent intellectual institution in all of ancient Greece.Plato authored a number of dialogues that often de-picted Socrates engaging in the educational mode ofdialectic. Like his mentor, Plato suspected that mostpeople did not know what they claimed to know,and hence wondered why rigorous qualifications forrulers did not exist. Challenging the Sophists’ claimsthat knowledge and truth were relative to the per-spective of each individual, Plato developed an epis-temology and metaphysics that suggested anabsolute truth that could only be gleaned throughrigorous self-examination and the development ofreason—skills crucial for enlightened political lead-ers.

The Ideal State

Plato’s educational ideas derived in part from hisconception of justice, both for individuals and forthe ideal state. He viewed individuals as mutually de-pendent for their survival and well-being, and heproposed that justice in the ideal state was congruentwith justice in the individual’s soul.

Plato’s ideal state was a republic with three cate-gories of citizens: artisans, auxiliaries, and philoso-

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