Piaget: Foundations

Five interviews into how a child builds a mind

A course on the thought of Jean Piaget.

Course outline

1. The Child Is Not a Small Adult — Piaget's founding reframe: a child does not think like an adult with less information, but like a different kind of thinker with its own coherent logic — and the way to see that logic is to take the…
2. How a Mind Changes — The engine of development: schemas, and the two complementary processes — assimilation (fitting new experience into existing schemas) and accommodation (changing schemas to fit new experience)…
3. Out of Sight — The sensorimotor stage (birth to ~2), where intelligence lives in action. Its signature achievement is object permanence — the knowledge that a thing still exists when it can no longer be seen…
4. More in the Tall Glass — The pre-operational stage (~2-7): rich in language and imagination, but not yet capable of the mental operations that hold quantity fixed. Its signature failures — non-conservation and centration…
5. Reason Arrives — The two mature stages: concrete operational (~7-11), where reversible operations finally allow conservation, classification, and seriation on real things; and formal operational (~11+), where thought…

Part of the Symposium course library.