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Azwihangwisi Edward Muthivhi,School of Education,University of Cape Town,Private Bag X3,Rondebosch 7701,Cape Town,South Africa.Tel.: +27 21 650 3371;fax: +27 21 650 3489.E-mail: [email protected]

KeywordsActivity; Cognitive development; Conservation; Education; Equilibration; Learning; Operations; Piaget; Sensory motor

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a0005 Piaget’s Theory of Human Development and EducationAzwihangwisi Edward Muthivhi, School of Education, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa

� 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This article is a revision of the previous edition article by J.J. Vonèche, volume 17, pp. 11437–11440, � 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

abspara0010 The article examines and reinterprets Piaget’s central theoretical tenets and their implications for contemporary educationalpractice. The author argues that Piaget’s theory posits human activity as the basis of human knowledge and human devel-opment. For Piaget, human activity drives and generates development, at each stage, creating qualitatively new ways ofknowing and relating to the world. This interpretation emphasizes the connectedness of mental processes to the world inwhich, and through which, development takes place and the agentive role played by subjects who transform their worldthrough active engagement. The implications that the theory has for education and the applications that derive from Piaget’stheoretical formulation is examined.

s0010 Introduction

p0015 Born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 1896 – and having a solidbackground in the biological sciences and obtaining a PhD atthe age of 22, after studying the behavior of molluscs, Piaget’stheory of human development grew out of the contradictionsof society of his early to mid-twentieth century society,contradictions that characterized the apparent tranquil of thesociety in which young Piaget grew up.

bib10

Perret-Clermont (1997)provides an examination of the sociocultural context in whichPiaget developed his theory to illuminate the meanings Piagetplaced on his system of theorizing, most of which may remainimplicit in contemporary debates of this theory. The socialcontext of Piaget’s, as Perret-Clermont suggests, was character-ized by conflict between religion and science as well as forms oftraditional authority structures. Meanwhile, scientificDarwinism was in its ascendance and provided supposedlyrigorous scientific account of biological and social processes(see

bib14

Stetsenko, 2008;bib10

Perret-Clermont, 1997).p0020 Piaget formulated a theory of human development that

derived its explanatory principles from biological processeswithout, however, reducing complex human psychologicalphenomena to purely biological adaptation (

bib11

Piaget, 2001).Therefore, Piaget sought to provide an account of the originand development of knowledge that emphasizes relationalprocesses between the individual and his or her environmentor social situations. The relational processes are based onactivities carried out simultaneously in the social and materialworld in which, and through which, development occurs;leading to transformation of self and – at the same time andwithin every stage – acquisition of qualitatively new modes ofrelating to the world; as well as new modes of knowing.

p0025 This article provides a general outline of Piaget’s theory ofhuman development and examines the implications thistheory has for education. The discussion begins with a briefoutline of the behavioral accounts of learning and develop-ment to which Piaget’s theory stands opposed. Piaget’s theoryof human development is examined in more detail, with themain tenets of the theory and its major conceptual groundingelaborated. Lastly, the application of the theory to education isexamined with a view to demonstrating the continuing

relevance; and enduring significance, of Piaget’s theory ofhuman development to education.

s0015Piaget versus Behavioral Explanations

p0030Piaget’s greatest impact in the social sciences lies – arguably, inhis critique of the behaviorist explanatory framework and itsdepiction of human psychological processes as comprisinghabit formation produced through reactions to the effects ofenvironmental (see Piaget,

bib12

2001,bib11

1964) behaviorism, aspsychological tradition sought to explain human psychologicalfunctioning using the same explanatory principles as thoseused in the natural sciences; thus seeking to establish the causalrelationships between environmental conditions on the onehand and human behavior on the other – with the formerconceived of in terms of stimuli and the later in terms ofresponses. The stimulus–response framework, as the behav-iorist tradition was alternatively called, posited that humanactions, including learning, were the result of the conditioningor habit formation as a result of positively reinforced responsesto stimulus effects. Thus, the human mind was conceived of interms of external associative relations between responses orreactions to the effects of environmental forces termed stimuli.Behaviorism ruled out the existence of mind as it assumed thisto be not amenable to scientific verification through experi-mental methods similar to those employed in the naturalsciences. Only studying the growth of behavior as resultingfrom the process of habit formation; occurring through theconditioning or habituation of positive experiences, could,according to behaviorists, lead to a valid, scientifically rigorousform of knowledge of the human condition (Piaget,bib12

2001,bib11

1964).p0035While Piaget’s theory resonates with social learning theorists

such as Bandura andMischel, the position of the social learningtheorists further supports the view of human subjects aspurposive, goal directed, and self-regulative rather than drivenby environmental influences. As in Piaget’s assertion about thecentrality of human self-regulative processes and, hence, activeself-directedness,

bib2

Bandura (2001) posits a view of humanagency premised on the essential conditions of humanintentionality, purposeful pursuits, and self-reflectiveness.

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This view, as in Piaget’s system, contradicts the mechanisticview of human nature; proposing a picture of humancondition as essentially subordinate to, and arising as mereresponses to, external forces of environmental stimulation.For

bib2

Bandura (2001) human activity is essentially agentic anddriven; not by nature itself, but by a new functional structurecreated through and out of human agentic conditions.

p0040 In this system, humans exercise self-control over theirthoughts and actions rather than being mere reactionaries toexternal forces. Their actions and thoughts are agentic andtherefore involve qualities of intentionality, purposefulness,goal-directedness, forethought, planful proaction, aspiration,self-appraisal, etc. These agentic qualities function withinfundamentally active (rather than reactive) and self-regulativehuman essence.

p0045 In a similar vein,bib6

Mischel (1973) states that self-regulatorysystems involve self-control through self-imposed goals andself-produced consequences for action. That is, persons havethe capacity to set performance goals for themselves and reactto these with self-criticism or self-satisfaction, depending onwhether they deem their performance consequences asmeeting their expectations and criteria. Achievement ofperformance goals will most likely lead to positive self-appraisal, self-gratification, and self-reinforcement, whileperception of failure may result in self-condemnation,anxiety, and desperation. The essence of self-regulatorysystem, according to

bib6

Mischel (1973), is the subject’s adoptionof contingency rules, which are important to guide actionand specify which behavior is appropriate under specificconditions. Social learning theories resonate with Piaget’ssystem and could be employed to expand on its explanatorypower, especially where personality differences in cognitiveperformance are to be accounted for. Piaget’s unparalleledcontribution to developmental psychology resides in hisaccount for the genetic origin of active; and self-regulative,essence of human condition through his theory of humandevelopment.

s0020 Piaget’s Theory of Human Development

p0050 Piaget posited an all-important construct of equilibration, onthe basis of which internal mental processes can becomprehended. For Piaget, the child did not acquireknowledge through reacting to the effects of environmentalforces and as a result building habits that become crystallizedinto forms of behavior. The construct of equilibrationsuggests that the subject is fundamentally active in his or herinteraction with the social and physical environment andorganizes his or her actions into schemas and structures onthe basis of which further construction of knowledgebecomes progressively possible. That is, the subject regulateshis or her own actions in the world and, turn these actionsand the consequences they have, internally, into means forcontrolling own thinking by establishing internal anticipatoryschemas and structures on the basis of which furtheracquisition and development of knowledge becomespossible. The concept of equilibration, therefore, unlike thestimulus–response concept of behavior, resuscitates the ideaof mind – and abstraction, which defines the complex forms

of human consciousness. From Piaget’s point of view,therefore, a rigorous, scientific methodology (scientific –

although not in the positivistic sense) that employsobservation and clinical experimentation could be employedto study the origin, development, and functioning of thehuman mind without need to resort to the causalexplanation of the behaviorist framework.

p0055Equilibration involves two complementary processes ofassimilation and accommodation. Assimilation involves anactive integration of knowledge (or stimuli) into preexistentmental structures. Accommodation involves the internalbalancing processes whereby modifications within the existentstructure or mode of knowing are carried out so as tocomprehend new knowledge effectively and hence retain a stateof balance or equilibrium to the hitherto disequilibratedstructures (see, Piaget,

bib12

1964,bib11

2001). Accommodation happenswhen a state of necessity for change arises on the part of thesubject or when the subject becomes aware of the discrepanciesbetween his or her state of knowing and the new knowledge tobe assimilated. Therefore, the two processes of assimilation andaccommodation are complementary, the former accounting forthe process of learning while the latter accounting for devel-opment. That is, development is accounted for as involving thequalitative changes that happen in the existing structures,necessitated by the realization and the internal need for changebrought about by the awareness of a state of imbalance or stateof disequilibration between new knowledge to be acquired andthe existing forms of knowledge on the part of the subject.

p0060Piaget argued that learning is explained through the processof assimilation – which, although it involves an active;rather than passive, integration of knowledge into preexistentstructures, does not, however, change the structures orexisting modes of knowing. What changes, rather, is theknowledge being assimilated as this is transformed so as tofit into existing mental structures. Thus, knowledge of theworld is not imprinted into the subject and theenvironmental forces do not determine the knowledge to beacquired in the sense assumed within stimulus–responsesystems. Rather, the subject is active – not in an aimless,purposeless, and trial-and-error fashion characteristic of theoperant conditioning models of later stimulus–responseframeworks that sought to explain human learning in wayssimilar to the habit formation processes established throughanimal behavior-change or conditioning experiments. Piaget’ssubject, or a child, is active in a purposeful manner where heor she acts on the world to master and comprehend it andthis action leads to internal mental coordinations; a processexplained through the concept of equilibration.

p0065Equilibration is therefore a motor for human developmentand this self-regulatory process emphasizes an active role thesubject has in the acquisition of knowledge; which, althougharises externally through the relational processes involvedduring the subject’s interaction with the world, is, however,coordinated from within, since it is the subject ultimatelythat acts and comprehends the world in terms consistentwith his or her existing structural organization. There isa sense of a biological adaptation involved in this process.However, Piaget termed this functional adaptation, in that itis not adaptation to the external world per se, but to theevolving structural organization or internal coordination of

2 Piaget’s Theory of Human Development and Education

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knowledge (bib11

Piaget, 2001). That is, the subject does not adapt tofit his or her existing knowledge to the form of knowledgeencountered from the outside, in his or her context oflearning and development. Rather, the subject adapts to hisor her existing; and yet, evolving conception of the worldthat he or she continuously modifies as and when the need –

or a feeling of necessity, arises because the present state ofknowledge is now deemed inadequate and creates dissonancethat needs to be compensated.

bib12

Piaget (1964), using thelanguage of the behaviorists to critic their model of learning,argued that the response was present long before thestimulus effects in the sense that it is not the externalenvironmental forces that determine; in an associative form,how the subject reacts, but the subject’s own, alreadyconstructed, modes of knowing or knowledge structures.

p0070 Therefore, Piaget provided a solid, genetic account ofhuman intellectual development grounded on humanactivity. First, the explanation emphasized genesis or devel-opmental origin and, therefore, solving the problem of thenativists or philosophical frameworks that subscribed to thenotion that knowledge was inborn. Second, the accountemphasized developmental progression – conceived, notas a quantitative accumulation of knowledge; as thebehaviorists have contended, but as involving the qualitativetransformation of knowledge from its simpler forms to itsmore complex forms characteristic of the adult forms that –ideally, enables elaboration of logical and scientificknowledge often privileged in social institutions such asformal schooling.

p0075 From a genetic point of view, action; according to Piaget,comprises the basis of human knowledge. Unlike the behav-iorists, action – for Piaget, did not only involve the physicalaspect of human behavior. Action is both, concrete andphysical as well as mental and abstract. This account ofaction simultaneously elaborates on the essential nature ofexperience, which in the stimulus–response system has beenassumed to constitute only the external aspect of humaninteraction with the physical and social environment. Piagetargued that action comprises both the external experience ofthe world involving; first, the subject’s interaction withconcrete objects in the world and; second, the consequencesof actions initially effected to objects in the world. That is,the subject experiences the world through his or her direct

interactions with it but eventually turns these experiencesinward into his or her internal plane where coordinationsare subsequently conducted mentally. The former type ofexperience is considered to lead to operative forms ofknowledge – that is, knowledge of how to relate to the worldexternally while the later type of experience is considered tolead to figurative forms of knowledge, which enables theknowing of the world through mental abstractions. Therefore,experience of the former type is externally directed towardthe world while the experience of the later type is internallydirected, toward mastery of self. It is, therefore, this mentalaction that leads to mental coordinations. The coordinationof a series of actions leads to what is termed a mentalstructure. A series of these structures combine to form anoperation. Piaget defined an operation as a series of actionsthat are reversible; that is, actions that have been organizedinto a reversible structure. These operations become the basisof meaningful, reflective activity through which the humanmind is able to engage in interpretive, comparative,evaluative, and analytic activities (Piaget,

bib12

1964,bib11

2001).

s0025Sensory-motor Stage

p0080The genetic approach traces the origin of operational knowl-edge from its developmental origin in the earliest forms ofhuman activity – the sensory-motor actions, which serve as theearly forms of mental coordinations. The coordination ofsensory and motor actions leads to the construction ofthe schemas or early structural organization of thought;leading to the acquisition of concepts of space, time,causality, and object permanency. For example, Piaget foundthat children acquired the notion of object permanencearound 18 months. That is, the child become aware of thefact that objects continue to exist even when they have beenremoved from its spatial field – and do not, therefore, ceaseto exist. The maturational processes of the nervous system areconnected to the development of the sensory and motoractivities and therefore make possible; and are transformedinto, developmental processes. The child progressivelymasters the world through interacting with it – assistedprimarily by its sensory and motor activities and as a resultbegins to construct – mentally, the functional knowledge ofthe world around it (Table 1). AU2

t0010 Table 1 Major developmental stages, their approximate age ranges, and the dominant activities thatcharacterize them

Major developmental stages Approximate age ranges Dominant cognitive activities

Sensory-motor 0–18 months Maturation, sensory and motor coordinationPreoperational 18 months to 5 years Self-mastery through egocentricism, symbolic

representation and early language acquisitionConcrete operations 5–11 years Decentration, self-monitoring, reflection, analysis, and

comparison necessary for logical–operational activitiesapplied to concrete situations and concrete objects.

Formal operations 12 years to adulthood Logical thought processes proceeding from abstractcategories and less dependent on concrete objects andsituations. Self-monitoring, self-reflection, analytic andcomparative activities, and increasing abstraction ofthought processes.

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p0085 Piaget (bib12

1964,bib11

2001) provided an example of a sensory-motor child attaining the concept of object permanencethrough the coordination of experiences and the acquisitionof a notion that objects do disappear and cease to exist whenremoved form visual field. As evidence to the acquisition ofthis concept was the child’s changed behavior with regard tohis or her interaction with objects; where by 18 months thechild begins to search for objects outside of its visual fieldwith the goal of finding them located somewhere. With thisacquisition is, of course, also the acquisition of the relatedconcept of space, which arises out of the specialcoordinations that characterized the sensory-motor activities.

p0090 The end of the sensory-motor stage heralds the dawn ofpreoperational thought around the age of two. By this stage,one begins to see the emergence of structural organization ofthinking in the form of operations or systems of actions thatare internally connected. However, these early forms ofthought structures are characterized by the lack of ‘mobility’or backward-and-forward movements – a fluidity thatprogressively resembles the logical and mathematical formsof thinking considered; within this theory, to constitute theapex of knowledge development. While the sensory-motorstage enables the mastery of the physical world through thecoordination of experiences; a process that weans the subjectfrom greater dependence on the effects of the environmentalforces characteristic of the perceptual processes, thepreoperational stage increases this distance from reliance onthe effects of the environmental forces. This process isprimarily facilitated by the development of symbolic formsof relations that characterize the social world and;specifically, the use of language (Piaget,

bib12

2001,bib11

1964).

s0030 Preoperational Stage

p0095 Piaget posited that the preoperational stage emerges around theage of 2 years and concludes at around the age of 4/5 years.There has been much debate of the actual age range at whichthis stage concludes. This is not surprising considering thatPiaget’s experimental work emphasized children’s deficientperformances on tasks that required reversible forms of mentaloperations for successful completion – an approach which,perhaps, was unduly influenced by his early work withchildren at Binet’s laboratory. At this stage, Piaget found thatchildren could not perform conservation tasks competently.

p0100 Piaget described the preoperational stage predominantly interms of the child’s inability to carry out operational thought orto understand conservation tasks – involving the ability tounderstand forms of knowledge that require reversible orreflective thought processes. That is, preoperational childrenwere found to lack the ability to comprehend situationswhere two or more categories are to be held constant – inperspective, in order to arrive at valid conceptualization ofa situation.

p0105 For example, Piaget presented a number of experiments inwhich preoperational children were not able to conserve orcomprehend quantity, weight, volume, etc. One of the mostcommon of these conservation experiments involved theconservation of quantity that is transferred from a shorter andwider glass container to a taller and narrower glass, thusshowing a changed appearance in the taller container; falsely

suggesting an increase in quantity. However, the transfer ofquantity if performed in the presence of the child and the childis asked we now have more or less quantity in the secondcontainer as a result of the transfer process. Preoperationalchildren were found to lack full comprehension of the situa-tion, focusing exclusively on the changed appearance of thequantity in the taller glass and as a result insisting on the notionthat there is an increase of quantity (Piaget,

bib12

2001,bib11

1964).p0110Piaget argued that a preoperational child lacks the ability to

hold the two categories constant in and to use this full infor-mation to arrive at a solution to the problem. That is, thepreoperational child is inclined to focus only on one aspect ofthe problem and to use only this to arrive at a solution of theproblem because he or she does not as yet have the cognitiveability hold two or more perspectives constant and to use thesesimultaneously as cognitive resources for getting to solutions ofproblems. This lack is necessitated by the nature of the devel-opmental stage that characterizes the child’s present cognitivefunctioning; wherein the preoperational child must consoli-date on his or her knowledge of the world that the sensory-motor activities have enabled him to construct andprogressively integrate this knowledge with the form ofknowledge that derives predominantly from his or herinternal, mental coordinations – a form of knowledge thatshould lead, not just to the mastery of the external world butalso to the mastery of self.

p0115During the preoperation stage, the child’s cognitive devel-opment is dominated by the need to master self and actions arepredominantly directed toward self-mastery and, as a result, thechild lacks the ability to ‘decenter’ (

bib11

Piaget, 2001). That is, thepreoperational child lacks the ability to see things from otherpeople’s perspective as he or she insists on own point ofview. Therefore, the dominant mode of thinking during thisstage is egocentric, making it difficult for the preoperationalto coordinate thinking to arrive; through analysis, at validsolution to the problem. This inability could indeed havenegative impact on the acquisition of numeracy and literacyskills should the preoperational child be placed withinformal learning situations in school. This difficulty mayarise, for example, from the inherent nature of formallearning such as the requirement in reading acquisition;simultaneously, to focus both on the phonemic (requiringthe understanding of the relations between speech soundsand letters of the alphabet) and the semantic (or meaning-making) aspects of the reading process.

p0120However, an undue emphasis on the cognitive deficienciesof the preoperation stage, as was characteristic of the dominantapproaches in Piagetian cross-cultural research, wasunfortunate. Positive developmental milestones are achievedduring the preoperational period, and this stage serves asgood preparation for acquisition of the operational forms ofthinking. For example, preoperational children acquire thecapacity for symbolic representation of which languagedevelopment is a crucial component. The preoperational iscrucial for children to gain mastery of themselves in relationto their growing participation within the world of adults. Thepreoperational stage is characterized, among other things, bythe development of language. Language development duringthis stage, however, takes a particular form that is consistentwith the character of the stage itself. The child acquires


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language and its symbolic function but the entire acquisition isoriented toward self-mastery. For example, the preoperationalchild uses the same words acquired during interaction withadults but attaches idiosyncratic meanings to these. Also, thepreoperational child may verbalize his or her thoughts asa way of controlling own actions, such as during situationswhen the child needs to commit something into memory.Meanwhile, the preoperational child plays with toys orobjects in his natural environment in creative ways. Forexample, a brick may be turned into a bus; a piece of woodmay become an airplane, etc. In this way, the preoperationalchild acquires the ability for symbolic representation,important both for language development and socialfunctioning, as well as for learning the various subject matterduring formal schooling later on when the child has reachedschool-going, concrete-operational stage. The significance ofegocentric forms of language in particular; and thinking ingeneral, which characterize the preoperational stage, has –

interestingly, been elaborated outside of the Piagetianframework (see

bib17

Vygotsky, 1986 for this elaboration).

s0035 Concrete Operational Stage

p0125 Fortunately, for the school-going child, the forms of thinkingrequired for successful learning of the formal knowledgecharacterizing the subject matter has already appeared in thechild’s mental capacities. The cognitive capacities for reflectingon own and other people’s perspectives; for comparison andanalysis, has already made their first emergence into thecognitive repertoire of the child. That is, all the deficiencies thatcharacterize the preoperational stage are overcome at theconcrete operational stage. However, the child still needs thesupport of concrete activities to carry out operational processescomprehensively. The concrete operational child can, forexample, make the necessary analysis of the situation; takinginto account all the information available to him or her, andarrive at valid conclusions about the quantity transferred fromone glass container to the other as described in Figure 2.2above. The concrete operational child would insist that thesame quantity remains even after the transfer to the secondcontainer because the activity of transferring from onecontainer to the other did not comprise adding to; or taking outfrom, the available quantity. Therefore, quantity is conservedbecause all available information constitutive of the situation istaken into account in arriving at a solution to the problem andquantity has – of necessity, been conserved. According toPiaget, this knowledge is not attained through simpleaccumulation of experience. It is the result of the internalself-regulatory activities of the human mind and comes aboutas a result of qualitative changes that comprise humanmental development.

p0130 However, while the concrete operational child is able tounderstand conservation tasks such as the one involving theconstancy of liquid quantity, his or her thought processes arestill reliant on concrete activities. That is, thought coordina-tions that involve reflective and reversible systems of ideas andconcepts still rely, predominantly, on concrete situations andobjects in the subject’s experiences. This idea of concreteoperations has mostly been misinterpreted to mean learningthrough concrete objects. However, while concrete objects

could be crucial in getting the preoperational child understandcomplex ideas, they should always be employed as a means toan end and not as an end in themselves; the end being togenerate capacity for analysis, comparison, and reflectiveactivities carried out mentally without dependence on externalprops. For example, teaching children to carry out basic arith-metic operations of addition, subtraction, division, andmultiplication through use of pebbles or abacus (which isa form of employment of concrete objects) should always beaimed at getting them tomaster these skills ‘internally’ or insidetheir mind. That is, the learning that happens here should beoriented toward the exteriorization or internalization of theseconcrete activities into the internal plane of cognitivefunctioning.

p0135In terms of children learning in school, the concrete oper-ational stage is critical for laying good foundations forsuccessful learning in school and many things could go wrongduring this period in cases of poor teaching and learningprovision. For example,

bib8

Muthivhi (2010) andbib9

Muthivhi andBroom (2009), studied concrete operational and formal oper-ational learners whose learning was characterized by the formsof teaching that did not prepare them adequately for; andelaborate on, the reflective processes necessary for successfullearning of the formal subject matter knowledge. These studiesfound that, although these learners demonstrated the levels ofperformance consistent with developmental stages, they ten-ded to be overreliant on concrete manifestations of the tasksand often derived conclusions to problems from their percep-tions of the concrete situation rather than from their concep-tualizations of the situation, taking full account of all availableinformation to arrive at a valid conclusion.

s0040Formal Operational Stage

p0140During the concrete operational stage, the child is consoli-dating a particular form of thinking that characterizes the socialworld of adults; the world of reflective, interpretative,comparative, and analytic activities; all of which are activities ofthe human mind, which, of course – as

bib18

Vygotsky (1978) hasargued, are dialectically related to the activities of society andculture. Piaget termed this stage in human development, theformal operational stage and focused predominantly onthe acquisition and development of the formal activities ofthe human mind, which he alternatively referred to as the‘logicomathematical’ processes (Piaget,

bib12

2001,bib11

1964). We canunderstand this specific emphasis to be influenced by theidea of the ‘true forms’ of human thought, unencumbered bysocial traditions and adult impositions, which; of course, hadits history in the philosophical traditions of EmmanuelKant’s proposition of the basic categories of thought asinvolving ‘time, space, causality, and time’ (Piaget,

bib12

2001,bib11

1964; see also Shayer, 2008).p0145Therefore, Piaget, sought to understand how human indi-

viduals – what is termed ontogenetic development – came toacquire the basic categories of the human mind that underliethe formal processes of human thinking; characteristic of theformal activities of the scientific and mathematical practices.As a result, logical processes of thought; their origin anddevelopment from early adolescent to adulthood, became themain emphasis of Piaget’s research. Where he included

AU3

AU4


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psychological processes other than those related to the logicalprocesses; such as language development, the role of thesocial and emotional development, the focus was on howthese processes were related to, and could be explainedfrom the vantage point of the functioning of thelogicomathematical process.

p0150 For Piaget, the formal operational thought, the onset ofwhich begins in early adolescence, marks children’s first entryinto the world of adults; in the sense that children begin toacquire the forms of thinking and attitudes to the words thatare primarily informed – not by how things appear in theworld – but by how the world makes sense to them fromthe point of view of their own interpretations andanalysis of situations. That is, they enter the world ofthoughtful existence; the world of abstraction, of logicaland propositional forms of thinking where the world –

and knowledge – are; essentially, products of mentalcoordinations. Formal operational children, or – moreprecisely, adolescence, may; for example, begin to questionthe status quo and existing social traditions as well as thetaken-for-granted world of adults even as they seek to enterand have meaningful existence into it – hence the radicalchanges often experienced in the appearance and behavior ofadolescence.

p0155 Clearly, this stage presents positive challenges and oppor-tunities for teachers as these learners are naturally very curiousand inquisitive. Piaget’s framework, therefore, points toa model of education that is explorative, investigative; as well asdirected by the curiosity and inquisitiveness of learners andcurriculum development initiatives could exploit this goldenopportunity to engage learners and involve them in theongoing quest for, and creation of, knowledge. However,young adolescents are often put off by the traditional forms ofeducation, still widespread all over the world, which focuses ondrilling of stale, factual knowledge, often putting pressure onlearners to learn most of the subject matter by heart or throughquasi-meaningful processes of committing rules andprocedures to memory so they could remember them for useas tools to work out solutions to given problems (seebib1

Arievitch and Stetsenko, 2000 for a detailed discussion oftraditional methods and their epistemologies). It was for thisreason, therefore, that Piaget opposed and doubted thecapacity of educational processes to contribute to children’sdevelopment and their desirability as a means of acceleratingdevelopment.

s0045 Application of Piaget’s Theory to Education

p0160 Piaget’s theory has important implications for educationalpractice. Its influence on modern education is unparalleled.Importantly, Piaget’s theory has contributed immensely intransforming the way in which children are conceptualized andhence, how they could more effectively be educated. For Piaget,as could be seen from the foregoing discussion, children areessentially active and do not therefore learn by passive reactionto stimulation around them. That is, they do not learn bypassively receiving knowledge from the world around them butactively; through their own agency, transform the world inwhich they live in order to know it. That does not mean, as

others assumed, that children should be left to their own devisesor that adults have no role to play in the life of the developingchild. However, Piaget cautioned against schooling, and relatedsocial systems that provided a child no room to come to theknowledge of the world through his or her own intellectualmeans; denying children their inherent disposition to know theworld in ways that made genuine sense to themselves.

p0165Piaget posited a child who is actively constructing his or herknowledge of the world through transforming it and therebyalso transforming himself or herself. That is, the child knows theworld through his or her existing but yet transforming (ratherthan just static) intellectual capacities. These capacities – asthe discussion of the inherent connectedness of the stages tothe dominant forms of the child’s activity in the world hasshown above – are not reducible to the individual or socialmoments of their manifestations. Therefore, learning anddevelopment in Piaget’s framework, although foregroundingthe primacy of the individual in ontogeny, does not supposea child or childhood as completely autonomous of, anddiscontinuous with, the society and culture in whichchildren’s learning and development take place.

p0170Therefore, teaching informed by the Piagetian theoreticalsystem would proceed from the assumption that children atspecific stages of development; such as the age of 6 years, wouldbe able to carry out reflective processes, provided that these aresupported by concrete phenomena with which they engage andon which their cognitive functions are applied. The concretenature of thought processes for the concrete operational childis, however, not limited to the use of concrete objects. Althoughthe use of concrete objects is important and should beencouraged at this stage, this should, however, be employed asa means for getting the child master the complex demands ofthe task such as carrying out number of operations that mayrequire the support of counters or abacus, for example. That is,the employment of concrete objects becomes a means to anend, the end beings the transformation of the child’s thinkingtoward abstract forms of thinking where thought processes areincreasingly carried out without the need for reliance onconcrete support. That is, elementary school learners atelementary school levels such as those in the age ranges of5.5–7.5 years could benefit from instruction that employsconcrete objects and examples to illustrate complex ideas andmodels as well as arithmetic principles and operations.However, such employment of concrete objects and examplesshould be employed as a means for helping learners toacquire an idea or principle that they would later on employon their own in solving related problems and base theirfuture learning of complex knowledge on the foundationalideas and concepts initially acquired through the help ofconcrete objects and empirical illustrations.

p0175Symbolic or semiotic systems that underpin the learning ofreading and writing as well as basic number operations couldbe acquired in this way. An understanding of the principles fora pedagogy that derive from Piaget’s system may be crucial foreducators to relate knowledge to early school learners moreeffectively in ways that contribute deep level learning anddevelopment. For example, Piaget’s system posits that childrenduring early formal school years are capable of employingcomplex mental capacities, involving holding two or moreperspectives simultaneously. Contemporary research on schoolAU5


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children’s use of cognitive capacities comprising the ability tohold two or more perspectives simultaneously during problemsolving suggests that while these capacities may owe theirdevelopment in children’s spontaneous activities (everyday-lifeactivities that do not necessarily involve teaching), their elab-oration and conscious application to problem situations maybe constrained if classroom instruction does not foster theirconscious application to problem situations (see,

bib8

Muthivhi,2010;

bib9

Muthivhi and Broom, 2009;bib13

Shayer, 1997).p0180 For Piaget, the acquisition for this cognitive capacity

demonstrates an important shift from self-centered, egocentricthought processes – where the child is not able to consider twoor more relevant aspects of a situation to arrive at a validconclusion – to a ‘decentered’ self-regulative and reflectiveform of thinking that characterizes operational thinking ofschool-going children. Piaget (

bib12

1964,bib11

2001) has positedsymmetrical social relations as necessary for the developmentof self-regulative thought processes. Symmetrical relationsinvolve relation of mutual epistemic respect and epistemicequality. Epistemic, in the sense that the equality andmutuality involved is necessarily in respect of intellectualengagement, exchange of ideas, adherence to the rules ofengagement in pursuit of knowledge and novel ideas, as wellas models of knowing the world and self. This view contraststhe assumption that the social in Piaget is solely andexclusively in respect of children’s relations to, andcollaboration with, each other (see, for example, thediscussion of the social in Piaget’s theory in

bib13

Shayer, 1997;bib10

Perret-Clermont, 1997;bib5

Labouvie-Vief, 1996). Contrarily, thenotion of mutuality can be employed by teachers to modelforms of classroom engagement that foster relations ofepistemic equity and mutuality that generate pedagogicsituations conducive for genuine learning and cognitivedevelopment (see; for example,

bib4

Ginsburg and Allardice’s,1984 Piaget’s inspired model). Meanwhile, the notion ofepistemic equity and mutuality can also be employed toorganize group-based, collaborative learning activities thatcontribute to learners’ self-regulative, reflective engagementwith the world and with novel ideas that come from thesubject matter of their classroom learning.

s0050 Vygotsky’s Framework as a Competing Paradigm

p0185 It was, ironically, in its capacity for application to educationalsettings; to provide solutions to most pressing challenges ofeducational underperformance, conceptual understanding,and task mastery, that Piaget’s theory of the origin and growthof knowledge has failed to make significant advances. Piaget’stheory was particularly critiqued for not taking adequateaccount of the social and cultural factors in its account ofcognitive development and functioning and therefore aslimited in its possibilities for application to classroom teachingand learning situations. Vygotsky’s theoretical system was, onthe contrary, credited for doing precisely what Piaget’s theorywas considered to have failed to achieve, that is, foregroundingthe role that sociocultural processes play in human develop-ment (e.g.,

bib7

Matusov and Hayes, 2000).p0190 The most powerful among current critiques of Piaget’s

system probably relate to his view of development as

proceeding by way of adaptation – as a form of biologicaladaptational process.

bib16

Vianna and Stetsenko (2006), forexample, argue that Piaget, by positing a view of children asdeveloping and learning in the spirit of adapting to existingconditions and mind as evolving out of actions throughwhich people adapt to the world, presents a limiting pictureof the human condition. Vygotsky, on the contrary, positinga view of children developing and learning as they activelychange the world they live in, simultaneously changingthemselves and gaining knowledge of themselves and of theworld, presents a position that transcends the constrainingpicture of humans as changing to fit it with the world intowhich they contribute nothing toward its transformation.

s0055Conclusion

p0195Piaget’s theory of human development has made an enormouscontribution to contemporary educational practice. Byrevealing that children think differently from adults; that chil-dren are not little adults in the making, and that their thinkingdiffers from that of adults not only in quantitative terms but inthe quality of thought processes involved, Piaget made a lastingcontribution to our knowledge of how teachers could appro-priately relate to learners as well as how knowledge couldeffectively be organized at different stages during children’sdevelopment.

p0200The theory inspired many educational models such aslearner-centered approach, discovery-based learning, activity-based learning, collaborative learning, constructivism,exploratory learning, and active enquiry-based learningmodels. These, and related educational models that derivedfrom Piaget’s theoretical systems had an immense influenceon many educational systems across the world. All of thesemodels, inspired by Piaget’s framework, proceed froma common ontology, a worldview that learning is a processthat is fundamentally driven, first and foremost, by theactivity of the learner – and not predominantly by the actionsof teachers or needs of society; with existing social structuresserving as unalterable telio or end point of humandevelopment.

See also: 92016; 92007; 92146; 26060.

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