Jean Piaget 1896 – 1980

📖 Bài đọc (reading passage)

Jean Piaget 1896 – 1980
Symour papert looks at the work of pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist
Jean Piaget spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and poring over reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succinctly, that children don’t think like grown-ups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly irrational utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery ‘so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.’

Although not an educational reformer, Piaget championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today’s education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the way modern anthropology displaced stories of primitive tribes being ‘noble savages’ and ‘cannibals’. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously.

He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge – little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own hypotheses about the world. And though he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud or even B F Skinner, his influence on psychology may be longer lasting.

In 1920, while doing research in a child-psychology laboratory in Paris, Piaget noticed that children of the same age made similar errors on intelligence tests. Fascinated by their reasoning processes, he began to suspect that the key to human knowledge might be discovered by observing how the child’s mind develops. On his return to Switzerland he began watching children play, scrupulously recording their words and actions as their minds raced to find reasons for why things are the way they are. In one of his most famous experiments, Piaget asked children, ‘What makes the wind?’. A typical dialogue would be:
Piaget: What makes the wind?
Julia: The trees.
Piaget: How do you know?
Julia: I saw them waving their arms.
Piaget: How does that make the wind?
Julia: (waving her hand in front of his face): Like this. Only they are bigger. And there are lots of trees.

Piaget recognized that five-year-old Julia’s beliefs, while not correct by any adult criterion, are not ‘incorrect’ either. They are entirely sensible and coherent within the framework of the child’s way of knowing. Classifying them as ‘true’ or ‘false’ misses the point and shows a lack of respect for the child. What Piaget was after was a theory that the wind dialogue demonstrated coherence, ingenuity and the practice of a kind of explanatory principle (in this case by referring to body actions) that stands young children in very good stead when they don’t know enough or don’t have enough skill to handle the kind of explanation that grow-ups prefer.

Piaget was not an educator and never laid down rules about how to intervene in such situations. But his work strongly suggests that the automatic reaction of putting the child right may well be counter-productive. If their theories are always greeted by ‘Nice try, but this is how it really is...’ they might give up after a while on making theories. As Piaget put it, ‘children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from inventing it themselves.’

Disciples of Piaget have tolerance for – indeed a fascination with – children’s primitive laws of physics: that things disappear when they are out of sight; that the moon and the sun follow you around; that big things float and small things sink. Einstein was intrigued by Piaget’s finding, especially by the idea that seven-year-olds insist that going faster can take more time – perhaps because this, like Einstein's own theories of relativity, runs so contrary to common sense.

Although every teacher in training still memorises Piaget’s successive stages of childhood development, the greater part of Piaget’s work is less well known, perhaps because schools of education regard it as ‘too deep’ for teachers. Piaget never thought of himself as a child psychologist. His real interest was epistemology – the theory of knowledge – which, like physics, was considered a branch of philosophy until Piaget came along and made it a science.

Through epistemology, Piaget explored multiple ways of knowing. He acknowledged them and examined them non-judgementally, yet with a philosopher’s analytic rigour. Since Piaget, the territory has been widely colonised by those who write about women’s ways of knowing, Afrocentric ways of knowing, even the computer’s ways of knowing. Indeed, artificial intelligence and the information-processing model of the mind owe more to Piaget than its proponents may realise.

The core of Piaget is his belief that looking carefully at how knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. Whether this has in fact led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, controversial. In the past decade, Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current fashion of viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those, like me, who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the difference between what the baby brings and what the adult has is so immense that the new discoveries do not significantly reduce the gap, but only increase the mystery.

❓ Câu hỏi (questions)

In the second paragraph, the writer mentions the example of modern anthropology to illustrate

the universality of Piaget’s insights into the workings of the mind.

the similarity between children’s thought processes in different cultures.

how Piaget’s work represents a crucial turning-point in our approach to education.

how Piaget’s work has aided our understanding of man’s evolution from primitive origins.

According to the writer, what point is illustrated by the dialogue about the wind?

The factual accuracy of what children say is of minor significance.

Children want to learn about scientific principles.

Children’s reasoning processes can be amusing to adults.

Children often pretend that they know the answers to questions.

Piaget believed in the importance of

preventing children from making false assumptions.

giving children honest feedback on their hypotheses.

showing children how to formulate their own ideas about the world.

maintaining children’s confidence in their ability to interpret the world.

What does the writer suggest in the seventh paragraph?

Children’s sense of their surroundings changes as they get older.

Children are able to grasp certain complex ideas as well as adults are.

Even apparently irrational ideas can be worthy of interest.

Sometimes the simplest explanations are the best.

The writer’s main purpose is to

outline Piaget’s contribution to a range of scientific fields.

summarise how education has benefited from Piaget’s findings.

discuss Piaget’s role in the development of 20th-century psychology.

express doubts about a number of Piaget’s theories.

Piaget maintained that children’s mental processes were far more ﻿ than they might appear. He encouraged the view that a child was not a ‘blank slate’ waiting to be filled with information, but rather a systematic builder of knowledge who regularly tries out his or her own ﻿ about the world.
Piaget’s impact on the area of ﻿ could well outlast that of more celebrated pioneers of this discipline. Despite doubts cast over his ideas by the current view associating knowledge exclusively with the ﻿, the effects of his work are still strong today. His principles are still widely used in the professional development of  ﻿.

correct

theories

brain

simple

teachers

psychology

logical

thought

philosophers

Piaget’s early work in Paris involved innovative research techniques.

Piaget gave clear guidelines as to how adults should give information to children.

Piaget made a significant contribution to the field of epistemology.

We still have much to learn about the nature of knowledge.

🔥 Answer key (đáp án và giải thích)

Giải thích chi tiết

☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Multiple Choice

Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)

Simplified: In the second paragraph , the writer mentions the example of modern anthropology to illustrate ...

-------

Step 02: Locate relevant information

🔍 Từ khoá: "modern anthropology", "illustrate", "second paragraph", "example"

--> Tìm được trích dẫn trong đoạn 2

-------

Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)

📌 Trích dẫn: "Although not an educational reformer, Piaget championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today’s education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the way modern anthropology displaced stories of primitive tribes being ‘noble savages’ and ‘cannibals’." (Đoạn 2)

Simplified:

Piaget championed a new way of thinking about children --> the foundation for modern education reform

This shift was comparable to modern anthropology displacing stories of primitive tribes

Main idea: Piaget đưa ra cách nhìn mới về trẻ em => nền tảng cho cải cách giáo dục -> bước ngoặt lớn, tương tự sự thay đổi trong nhân học hiện đại.

-------

Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning</b

❌ A. The universality of Piaget's insights into the workings of the mind.

--> Sai vì đoạn văn không nói Piaget chứng minh tính phổ quát của tư duy con người.

❌ B. The similarity between children's thought processes in different cultures.

--> Sai vì không hề đề cập đến so sánh tư duy trẻ em giữa các nền văn hoá → ví dụ nhân học chỉ dùng để minh hoạ mức độ thay đổi, không phải nội dung nghiên cứu

✅ C. How Piaget’s work represents a crucial turning-point in our approach to education.

--> Đúng vì ví dụ về nhân học hiện đại được dùng để nhấn mạnh rằng Piaget tạo ra một bước ngoặt tư duy, làm nền tảng cho cải cách giáo dục và thay đổi cách nhìn nhận trẻ em.

❌ D. How Piaget's work has aided our understanding of man's evolution from primitive origins.

--> Sai vì nhân học hiện đại được nhắc đến như một phép so sánh, không phải để nói về tiến hoá loài người.

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