Top 15 Jean Piaget Quotes

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.

Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.

What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.

Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.

Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.

I could not think without writing.

Children should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research. Teachers, of course, can guide them by providing appropriate materials, but the essential thing is that in order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it. Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life.

Every response, whether it be an act directed towards the outside world or an act internalized as thought, takes the form of an adaptation or, better, of a re-adaptation.

Play is the work of childhood.

Logic is the mirror of thought, and not vice versa;in classes, relations et nombres; essai sur les groupements de logistique et la réversibilitié de lq pensée

The individual acts only if he experiences a need, i.e., if the equilibrium between the environment and the organism is momentarily upset, and action tends to re-establish the equilibrium, i.e., to re-adapt the organism (Claparède).

Every structure is to be thought of as a particular form of equilibrium, more or less stable within its restricted field and losing its stability on reaching the limits of the field.

I know some very intelligent philosophers, not at all dogmatic, who believe that “science” cannot introduce the concept of finality in the analysis and explanation of vital processes, but that “philosophy” equally cannot arrive at an adequate concept of organic life without introducing finality. It is not a question here of moral or other values, but rather of a concept peculiar to philosophical biology as opposed to biology. Indeed, one such philosopher concluded, drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty, that science can “never” give an adequate explanation of the concept of the “whole structure” of the organism.

intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most durable structural equilibrium of behaviour, is essentially a system of living and acting operations.

"According to Claparède, feelings appoint a goal for behaviour, while intelligence merely provides the means (the "technique"). But there exists an awareness of ends as well as of means, and this continually modifies the goals of action."