Jean Piaget

1896–1980 · Switzerland

Swiss psychologist who described how children's thinking develops through a series of stages.Encyclopaedia Britannica · Jean Piaget ↗

Core ideas

Children actively build their own understanding of the world.Encyclopaedia Britannica · Jean Piaget ↗
Thinking develops in stages, from learning through the senses and movement in infancy to abstract reasoning in adolescence.Encyclopaedia Britannica · Jean Piaget ↗

What it means for parents today: Give children objects to explore and problems slightly beyond them, and expect their reasoning to differ from an adult's.Encyclopaedia Britannica · Jean Piaget ↗

What modern research supports

We have not yet found reliable research that tests these ideas directly.

What is outdated or needs correcting

Babies understand more, earlier, than he thought: 5-month-olds already seem to know hidden objects still exist.Baillargeon, 1985
Some difficulties he put down to reasoning turned out to come mainly from memory limits.Encyclopaedia Britannica · Human intelligence: post-Piaget theories ↗

Read the originals free

The original works are still under copyright, or we found no legal free copy, so we do not link one.

We link only public-domain or officially free copies, such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and Wikisource.

Age stages that draw on these ideas

Babies · 0–12 months School age · 6–12 years Teens · 12–18 years

Other educators:Confucius Jean-Jacques Rousseau Friedrich Froebel Maria Montessori John Dewey Cai Yuanpei Lev Vygotsky Tao Xingzhi Erik Erikson