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 … - Jean Piaget

If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another. The explainer believes from the start that the reproducer will grasp everything, will almost know beforehand all that should be known, and will interpret every subtlety. Children are perpetually surrounded by adults who not only know much more than they do, but who also do everything in their power to understand them, who even anticipate their thoughts and desires. Children, therefore... are perpetually under the impression that people can read their thoughts, and in extreme cases, can steal their thoughts away. It is obviously owing to this mentality that children do not take the trouble to express themselves clearly... This mentality does not contradict ego-centric mentality. Both arise from the belief of the child, the belief that he is the centre of the universe. These habits of thought account... for the remarkable lack of precision in the childish style.

As Bovet has demonstrated in the field of morals, rules do not appear in the mind of the child as innate facts, but as facts that are transmitted to him by his seniors, and to which from his tenderest years he has to conform by means of a sui generis form of adaptation. This, of course, does not prevent some rules from containing more than others an element of rationality, thus corresponding to the deepest fundamental constants of human nature. But whether they be rational or simply a matter of usage and consensus of opinion, rules imposed on the childish mind by adult constraint do begin by presenting a more or less uniform character of exteriority and sheer authority. So that instead of passing smoothly from an early individualism (the "social" element of the first months is only biologically social, so to speak, inside the individual, and therefore individualistic) to a state of progressive cooperation, the child is from his first year onwards in the grip of coercive education which goes straight on and ends by producing what Claprède has so happily called a veritable "short circuit."

I … sent a program of research to the Rockefeller Foundation. … [Their] questions were almost all of a surprising pertinence. I remember the practical questions … But I particularly remember the theoretical questions, due among others to [Shannon] Weaver, the mathematician interested in information theory who was then in charge of the Department of Science at the Foundation: How will you find interesting epistomological ideas, for example, the theory of relativity, in studying children who know nothing and who in any case are brought up in the intellectual tradition dating from Newton? …

I had the luck to be able to remark … that Einstein himself had advised me in 1928 to study the formation of the intuitions of velocity in order to see if they depended on those of duration, and that further, when I had the good fortune to see Einstein again at Princeton …, he was quite delighted by the reactions of nonconservation of children of four to six years (they deny that a liquid conserves its quantity when it is poured from one glass into another of a different shape: ‘There is more to drink than before,‘ etc.), and was greatly astonished that the elementary concepts of conservation were only constructed toward seven or eight years.