ABSTRACT
The work of Piaget has dominated the psychology of intellectual development for several decades. There is not the space here to go into details concerning his work. The important thing to note is that his description of the thinking of (young) children is mainly in terms of their incompetence; of how, that is, they cannot yet reason. The major characteristic of young children’s thinking, according to Piaget, is that they are unable to ‘decentre’, that is they focus on a limited aspect of an object or situation, resulting in false conclusions or ‘illogical’ thinking. Just a few examples must suffice to illustrate this. The young child cannot put himself at the point of view of another person when it is different from his own: he ‘centres’ on his own point of view. If the shape of some malleable substance is changed, (if a ball of clay, for example, is rolled into a sausage shape) a young child believes the quantity has either increased or decreased. He does so because he centres either on the increase in length and ignores the decrease in width or vice versa. Young children generally centre on similarities between objects and ignore dissimilarities. Piaget’s example is of a child who, on a walk, saw first one slug and then another slug and concluded they were the same slug. Conversely and paradoxically, a child may sometimes centre on dissimilarities and ignore similarities. This leads him to conclude, for example, that there are several suns because he has seen the sun in different places. This account of young children’s thinking is in terms of incompetence; of what they cannot yet understand; of how they cannot yet think. It creates a problem for those concerned with the education of young children, when their traditional wisdom has been that it is
important to start with what a child can do and understand; with his competencies rather than his incompetencies.
