Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society... But for me, education means making creator… - Jean Piaget

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 all the rest of his life.

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 could not think without writing.