ABSTRACT
The work of Jean Piaget is an example of the cognitive perspective in psychology and the study of his findings has been a major element of primary students’ and teachers’ psychology courses for many years and as was demonstrated in the section on the liberal romantic tradition (pp. 79- 94) his views have been used to justify educational practice in primary education. More recently, however, his ideas have been the subject of considerable criticism (see for example the extracts by Tamburrini (pp. 297-300), Donaldson (pp. 306-71) and Boyle (pp. 301-5)). Despite these criticisms, many of his proposals have stood the test of time and, as Piaget has suggested, theories should not be seen as static, they are ever-evolving and should be subject to modification in the light of new knowledge. His major contribution is likely to have been the questions he raised for others to study. Piaget did not really see himself as an educationalist, rather his interest was in ‘genetic epistemology’, the study of the nature and acquisition of knowledge. Applications of his ideas to education have depended to a great extent on others.
Isaacs was one of a number of psychologists who have interpreted the writings of Piaget and have discussed their implications for education. Here he draws the readers’ attention to the importance of not misunderstanding Piaget’s work so to constrain expectations of what a child can or cannot do by virtue of chronological age. Development proceeds in stages which are only very approximately age-related. Piaget merely cited the ages at which children in Geneva solved particular problems. These ages are not to be generalized to all children irrespective of culture and individual differences. Of special importance are the implications that the present level of thought structure sets limits to what can be meaningfully learned at a given time, and, from that, that the teacher needs to match work sufficiently closely to extend from existing understanding. This point recurs in other extracts. Isaacs rightly stresses that environment is not ignored by Piaget, but is very much a feature of his theory. According to the latter, development is essentially a question of the child’s actions upon the environment, and higher levels of thought represent internalized action in which language comes to substitute for overt action. The weakness here, which is not drawn out by Isaacs, is that Piaget did not differentiate qualitative nor quantitative features of the milieu in which the child grows.
