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PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
Philosophy of education can refer to either the academic field of applied
philosophy or to one of any educational philosophies that promote a specific type or vision
of education, and/or which examine the definition, goals and meaning of education.

As an academic field, philosophy of education is "the philosophical study

of education and its problems...its central subject matter is education, and its methods are
those of philosophy". "The philosophy of education may be either the philosophy of the
process of education or the philosophy of the discipline of education. That is, it may be part
of the discipline in the sense of being concerned with the aims, forms, methods, or results
of the process of educating or being educated; or it may be metadisciplinary in the sense of
being concerned with the concepts, aims, and methods of the discipline." As such, it is both
part of the field of education and a field of applied philosophy, drawing from fields
of metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and the philosophical approaches (speculative,
prescriptive, and/or analytic) to address questions in and about pedagogy, education policy,
and curriculum, as well as the process of learning, to name a few. For example, it might
study what constitutes upbringing and education, the values and norms revealed through
upbringing and educational practices, the limits and legitimization of education as an
academic discipline, and the relation between educational theory and practice.

Instead of being taught in philosophy departments, philosophy of education is usually

housed in departments or colleges of education, similar to how philosophy of law is
generally taught in law schools. The multiple ways of conceiving education coupled with the
multiple fields and approaches of philosophy make philosophy of education not only a very
diverse field but also one that is not easily defined. Although there is overlap, philosophy of
education should not be conflated with educational theory, which is not defined specifically
by the application of philosophy to questions in education. Philosophy of education also
should not be confused with philosophy education, the practice of teaching and learning the
subject of philosophy.

Philosophy of education can also be understood not as an academic discipline but

as a normative educational theory that unifies pedagogy, curriculum, learning theory, and
the purpose of education and is grounded in specific metaphysical, epistemological, and
axiological assumptions. These theories are also called educational philosophies. For
example, a teacher might be said to follow a perennialist educational philosophy or to follow
a perennialist philosophy of education.

Epistemology (from Greek (epistēmē), meaning "knowledge, understanding",

and (logos), meaning "study of") is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and
scope (limitations) of knowledge.

The term was introduced by the Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier (1808–1864).

It addresses mainly the following questions:

What is knowledge?

How is knowledge acquired?

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To what extent is it possible for a given subject or entity to be known?

Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how
it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification. One view is the
objection that there is very little or no knowledge at all—skepticism. The field is sometimes
referred to as the theory of knowledge.

Axiology (from Greek , axiā, "value, worth"; and, logos) is the philosophical study
of value. It is either the collective term for ethics and aesthetics—philosophical fields that
depend crucially on notions of value—or the foundation for these fields, and thus similar
to value theory and meta-ethics. The term was first used in the early 20th century by Paul
Lapie, in 1902, and Eduard von Hartmann, in 1908.

Axiology studies mainly two kinds of values: ethics and aesthetics. Ethics investigates the
concepts of "right" and "good" in individual and social conduct. Aesthetics studies the
concepts of "beauty" and "harmony." Formal axiology, the attempt to lay out principles
regarding value with mathematical rigor, is exemplified by Robert S. Hartman's Science of
Value.

Pedagogy is the science of education. Through theories and practices it aims to support the
full development of the human being. It may be implemented in practice as a personal and
holistic approach of socializing and upbringing children and young people. The term is not
to be confused with social pedagogy, where society (represented by social pedagogues)
holds a bigger part of the responsibility of the citizen's (often with mental or physical
disabilities) well-being.

Pedagogy is also occasionally referred to as the correct use of instructive strategies

(see instructional theory). For example, Paulo Freire referred to his method of teaching
people as "critical pedagogy". In correlation with those instructive strategies the instructor's
own philosophical beliefs of instruction are harbored and governed by the pupil's
background knowledge and experience, situation, and environment, as well as
learning goals set by the student and teacher. One example would be the Socratic schools
of thought.

Normative has specialized contextual meanings in several academic disciplines.

Generically, it means relating to an ideal standard or model. In practice, it has strong
connotations of relating to a typical standard or model.

Idealism-Plato (Date: 424/423 BC - 348/347 BC)

Plato's educational philosophy was grounded in his vision of the ideal Republic, wherein the
individual was best served by being subordinated to a just society. He advocated removing
children from their mothers' care and raising them as wards of the state, with great care
being taken to differentiate children suitable to the various castes, the highest receiving the
most education, so that they could act as guardians of the city and care for the less able.
Education would be holistic, including facts, skills, physical discipline, and music and art,
which he considered the highest form of endeavor.
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Plato believed that talent was distributed non-genetically and thus must be found in children
born in any social class. He builds on this by insisting that those suitably gifted are to be
trained by the state so that they may be qualified to assume the role of a ruling class. What
this establishes is essentially a system of selective public education premised on the
assumption that an educated minority of the population are, by virtue of their education (and
inborn educability), sufficient for healthy governance.

Plato's writings contain some of the following ideas: Elementary education would be
confined to the guardian class till the age of 18, followed by two years of training and then
by higher education for those who qualified. While elementary education made the soul
responsive to the environment, higher education helped the soul to search for truth which
illuminated it. Both boys and girls receive the same kind of education. Elementary education
consisted of music and gymnastics, designed to train and blend gentle and fierce qualities
in the individual and create a harmonious person.

At the age of 20, a selection was made. The best one would take an advanced course in
mathematics, geometry, astronomy and harmonics. The first course in the scheme of higher
education would last for ten years. It would be for those who had a flair for science. At the
age of 30 there would be another selection; those who qualified would study dialectics
and metaphysics, logic and philosophy for the next five years. They would study the idea of
good and first principles of being. After accepting junior positions in the army for 15 years, a
man would have completed his theoretical and practical education by the age of 50.

Immanuel Kant (Date: 1724–1804)

Immanuel Kant believed that education differs from training in that the latter involves
thinking whereas the former does not. In addition to educating reason, of central importance
to him was the development of character and teaching of moral maxims. Kant was a
proponent of public education and of learning by doing.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Date: 1770–1831)

First published Thu Feb 13, 1997; substantive revision Thu Jul 22, 2010

Along with J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. von Schelling, Hegel (1770–1831) belongs to the
period of “German idealism” in the decades following Kant. The most systematic of the
post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his
lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a “logical” starting
point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account
which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical
development culminating in communism. For most of the twentieth century, the “logical”
side of Hegel's thought had been largely forgotten, but his political and social philosophy
continued to find interest and support. However, since the 1970s, a degree of more general
philosophical interest in Hegel's systematic thought has also been revived.

Hegel's Philosophy

Hegel's own pithy account of the nature of philosophy given in the “Preface” to his Elements
of the Philosophy of Right captures a characteristic tension in his philosophical approach
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and, in particular, in his approach to the nature and limits of human cognition. “Philosophy,”
he says there, “is its own time raised to the level of thought.”

On the one hand we can clearly see in the phrase “its own time” the suggestion of an
historical or cultural conditionedness and variability which applies even to the highest form
of human cognition, philosophy itself. The contents of philosophical knowledge, we might
suspect, will come from the historically changing contents of its cultural context. On the
other, there is the hint of such contents being “raised” to some higher level, presumably
higher than other levels of cognitive functioning such as those based in everyday
perceptual experience, for example, or those characteristic of other areas of culture such as
art and religion. This higher level takes the form of conceptually articulated “thought,” a type
of cognition commonly taken as capable of having “eternal” contents (think of Plato and
Frege, for example).

This antithetical combination within human cognition of the temporally-conditioned and the
eternal, a combination which reflects a broader conception of the human being as what
Hegel describes elsewhere as a “finite-infinite,” has led to Hegel being regarded in different
ways by different types of philosophical readers. For example, an historically-minded
pragmatist like Richard Rorty, distrustful of all claims or aspirations to the “God's-eye view,”
could praise Hegel as a philosopher who had introduced this historically reflective
dimension into philosophy (and set it on the characteristically “romantic” path which has
predominated in modern continental philosophy) but who had unfortunately still remained
bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths
(Rorty 1982). Those adopting such an approach to Hegel tend to have in mind the
(relatively) young author of the Phenomenology of Spirit and have tended to dismiss as
“metaphysical” later and more systematic works like the Science of Logic. In contrast, the
British Hegelian movement at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, tended to
ignore the Phenomenology and the more historicist dimensions of his thought, and found in
Hegel a systematic metaphysician whose Logic provided a systematic and definitive
philosophical ontology. This latter traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel dominated Hegel
reception for most of the twentieth century, but from the 1980s came to be challenged by
scholars who offered an alternative “non-metaphysical” “post-Kantian” view of Hegel. In
turn, the post-Kantian reading has been challenged by a revised metaphysical view, in
which appeal is often made to Aristotelian conceptual realist features of Hegel's thought.

Before surveying these competing views, however, something needs to be said about the
confusing term “idealism,” and about the variety of idealism that is characteristic of Hegel
and other German idealists.

Realism-Aristotle (Date: 384 BC - 322 BC)

Only fragments of Aristotle's treatise On Education are still in existence. We thus know of
his philosophy of education primarily through brief passages in other works. Aristotle
considered human nature, habit and reason to be equally important forces to be cultivated
in education. Thus, for example, he considered repetition to be a key tool to develop good
habits. The teacher was to lead the student systematically; this differs, for example, from
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Socrates' emphasis on questioning his listeners to bring out their own ideas (though the
comparison is perhaps incongruous since Socrates was dealing with adults).

Aristotle placed great emphasis on balancing the theoretical and practical aspects of
subjects taught. Subjects he explicitly mentions as being important included reading, writing
and mathematics; music; physical education; literature and history; and a wide range of
sciences. He also mentioned the importance of play.

One of education's primary missions for Aristotle, perhaps it’s most important, was to
produce good and virtuous citizens for the polis. All who have meditated on the art of
governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education
of youth.

Avicenna (Date: 980 AD - 1037 AD)

In the medieval Islamic world, an elementary school was known as a maktab, which dates
back to at least the 10th century. Like madrasahs (which referred to higher education), a
maktab was often attached to a mosque. In the 11th century, Ibn Sina (known as
Avicenna in the West), wrote a chapter dealing with the maktab entitled "The Role of the
Teacher in the Training and Upbringing of Children", as a guide to teachers working
at maktab schools. He wrote that children can learn better if taught in classes instead of
individual tuition from private tutors, and he gave a number of reasons for why this is the
case, citing the value of competition and emulation among pupils as well as the usefulness
of group discussions and debates. Ibn Sina described the curriculum of a maktab school in
some detail, describing the curricula for two stages of education in a maktab school.

Ibn Sina wrote that children should be sent to a maktab school from the age of 6 and be
taught primary education until they reach the age of 14. During which time, he wrote that
they should be taught the Qur'an, Islamic metaphysics, language, literature, Islamic ethics,
and manual skills (which could refer to a variety of practical skills).

Ibn Sina refers to the secondary education stage of maktab schooling as the period of
specialization, when pupils should begin to acquire manual skills, regardless of their social
status. He writes that children after the age of 14 should be given a choice to choose and
specialize in subjects they have an interest in, whether it was reading, manual skills,
literature, preaching, medicine, geometry, trade, craftsmanship, or any other subject or
profession they would be interested in pursuing for a future career. He wrote that this was a
transitional stage and that there needs to be flexibility regarding the age in which pupils
graduate, as the student's emotional development and chosen subjects need to be taken
into account.

The empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa' was also developed by Ibn Sina. He argued that the
"human intellect at birth is rather like a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized
through education and comes to know" and that knowledge is attained through "empirical
familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts" which is
developed through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to prepositional
statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued
that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the material intellect (al-‘aql
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al-hayulani), that potentiality that can acquire knowledge to the active intellect (al-‘aql al-
fa‘il), the state of the human intellect in conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge."

Ibn Tufail (Date: c. 1105 – 1185)

In the 12th century, the Andalusian-Arabian philosopher and novelist Ibn Tufail (known as
"Abubacer" or "Ebn Tophail" in the West) demonstrated the empiricist theory of 'tabula rasa'
as a thought experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqzan, in which
he depicted the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an
adult, in complete isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone.
The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, Philosophus Autodidactus, published by
Edward the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa
in "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".

John Locke (Date: 1632-1704)

Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education is an outline on how to educate this mind:
he expresses the belief that education make the man, or, more fundamentally, that the mind
is an "empty cabinet", with the statement, "I think I may say that of all the men we meet
with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education."

Locke also wrote that "the little and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies
have very important and lasting consequences." He argued that the "associations of ideas"
that one makes when young are more important than those made later because they are
the foundation of the self: they are, put differently, what first mark the tabula rasa. In
his Essay, in which is introduced both of these concepts, Locke warns against, for example,
letting "a foolish maid" convince a child that "goblins and sprites" are associated with the
night for "darkness shall ever afterwards bring with it those frightful ideas, and they shall be
so joined, that he can no more bear the one than the other."

"Associationism", as this theory would come to be called, exerted a powerful influence

over eighteenth-century thought, particularly educational, as nearly every educational writer
warned parents not to allow their children to develop negative associations. It also led to the
development of psychology and other new disciplines with David Hartley's attempt to
discover a biological mechanism for Associationism in his Observations on Man (1749).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Date: 1712-1778)

Rousseau, though he paid his respects to Plato's philosophy, rejected it as impractical due
to the decayed state of society. Rousseau also had a different theory of human
development; where Plato held that people are born with skills appropriate to different
castes (though he did not regard these skills as being inherited), Rousseau held that there
was one developmental process common to all humans. This was an intrinsic, natural
process, of which the primary behavioral manifestation was curiosity. This differed from
Locke's 'tabula rasa' in that it was an active process deriving from the child's nature, which
drove the child to learn and adapt to its surroundings.

Rousseau wrote in his book Emile that all children are perfectly designed organisms, ready
to learn from their surroundings so as to grow into virtuous adults, but due to the malign
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influence of corrupt society, they often fail to do so. Rousseau advocated an educational
method which consisted of removing the child from society—for example, to a country
home—and alternately conditioning him through changes to his environment and setting
traps and puzzles for him to solve or overcome.

Rousseau was unusual in that he recognized and addressed the potential of a problem of
legitimation for teaching. He advocated that adults always be truthful with children, and in
particular that they never hide the fact that the basis for their authority in teaching was
purely one of physical coercion: "I'm bigger than you." Once children reached the age of
reason, at about 12, they would be engaged as free individuals in the ongoing process of
their own.

He once said that a child should grow up without adult interference and that the child must
be guided to suffer from the experience of the natural consequences of his own acts or
behaviour. When he experiences the consequences of his own acts, he advises himself.

"Rousseau divides development into five stages (a book is devoted to each). Education in
the first two stages seeks to the senses: only when Émile is about 12 does the tutor begin
to work to develop his mind. Later, in Book 5, Rousseau examines the education of Sophie
(whom Émile is to marry). Here he sets out what he sees as the essential differences that
flow from sex. 'The man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and
passive' (Everyman edn: 322). From this difference comes a contrasting education. They
are not to be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework: Nature means them to think,
to will, to love to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in
their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of
men. They should learn many things, but only such things as suitable' (Everyman edn.:
327)." Émile

Mortimer Jerome Adler (Date: 1902-2001)

Mortimer Jerome Adler was an American philosopher, educator, and popular author. As a
philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. He lived for the
longest stretches in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and San Mateo, California. He
worked for Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, and
Adler's own Institute for Philosophical Research. Adler was married twice and had four
children. Adler was a proponent of educational perennialism.

Harry S. Broudy (Date: 1905-1998)

Broudy's philosophical views were based on the tradition of classical realism, dealing with
truth, goodness, and beauty. However he was also influenced by the modern philosophy
existentialism and instrumentalism. In his textbook Building a Philosophy of Education he
has two major ideas that are the main points to his philosophical outlook: The first is truth
and the second is universal structures to be found in humanity's struggle for education and
the good life. Broudy also studied issues on society's demands on school. He thought
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education would be a link to unify the diverse society and urged the society to put more
trust and a commitment to the schools and a good education.

Scholasticism-Thomas Aquinas (Date: c. 1225 – 1274)

Etymology: The terms "scholastic" and "scholasticism" derive from the Latin word
scholasticus, which means "that [which] belongs to the school." The "scholastics" were,
roughly, "schoolmen.

Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics

(scholastics, or schoolmen) of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and
a program of employing that method in articulating and defending dogma in an increasingly
pluralistic context. It originated as an outgrowth of, and a departure from, Christian
monastic schools.

Not so much a philosophy or a theology as a method of learning, scholasticism places a

strong emphasis on dialectical reasoning to extend knowledge by inference, and to resolve
contradictions. Scholastic thought is also known for rigorous conceptual analysis and the
careful drawing of distinctions. In the classroom and in writing, it often takes the form of
explicit disputation: a topic drawn from the tradition is broached in the form of a question,
opponents' responses are given, a counterproposal is argued and opponent's arguments
rebutted. Because of its emphasis on rigorous dialectical method, scholasticism was
eventually applied to many other fields of study.

As a program, scholasticism began as an attempt at harmonization on the part of medieval

Christian thinkers: to harmonize the various authorities of their own tradition and to
reconcile Christian theology with classical and late antiquity philosophy, especially that of
Aristotle but also of Neoplatonism.

The main figures of scholasticism historically are Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard,
Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Bonaventure and
Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas's masterwork, the Summa Theologica, is often seen as
the highest fruit of Scholasticism. Important work in the scholastic tradition has been carried
on, however, well past Aquinas' time, for instance by Francisco Suárez and Molina, and
also among Lutheran and Reformed thinkers.

Scholastic method: The scholastics would choose a book by a renowned scholar, actor
(author), as a subject for investigation. By reading it thoroughly and critically, the disciples
learned to appreciate the theories of the author. Other documents related to the book would
be referenced, such as Church councils, papal letters and anything else written on the
subject, be it ancient or contemporary. The points of disagreement and contention between
multiple sources would be written down in individual sentences or snippets of text, known
as sententiae.

Once the sources and points of disagreement had been laid out through a series of
dialectics, the two sides of an argument would be made whole so that they would be found
to be in agreement and not contradictory. (Of course, sometimes opinions would be totally
rejected, or new positions proposed.) This was done in two ways.
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The first was through philological analysis. Words were examined and argued to have
multiple meanings. It was also considered that the actor might have intended a certain word
to mean something different. Ambiguity could be used to find common ground between two
otherwise contradictory statements.

The second was through logical analysis, which relied on the rules of formal logic to show
that contradictions did not exist but were subjective to the reader.

John Milton (Date: 1608-1674)

The objective of medieval education was an overtly religious one, primarily concerned with
uncovering transcendental truths that would lead a person back to God through a life of
moral and religious choice (Kreeft 15). The vehicle by which these truths were uncovered
was dialectic:

To the medieval mind, debate was a fine art, a serious science, and a fascinating
entertainment, much more than it is to the modern mind, because the medievals believed,
like Socrates, that dialectic could uncover truth. Thus a ‘scholastic disputation’ was not a
personal contest in cleverness, nor was it ‘sharing opinions’; it was a shared journey of
discovery (Kreeft 14-15).

Pragmatism-John Dewey (Date: 1859-1952)

In Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Dewey stated
that education, in its broadest sense, is the means of the "social continuity of life" given the
"primary ineluctable facts of the birth and death of each one of the constituent members in a
social group". Education is therefore a necessity, for "the life of the group goes on."

Dewey was a proponent of Educational and was a relentless campaigner for reform of
education, pointing out that the authoritarian, strict, pre-ordained knowledge approach of
modern traditional education was too concerned with delivering knowledge, and not enough
with understanding students' actual experiences.

William James (Date: 1842–1910)

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and
psychologist who had trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a
psychology course in the United States.

James wrote influential books on pragmatism, psychology, educational psychology, the

psychology of religious experience, and mysticism. He was the brother of novelist Henry
James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, William James married Alice
Gibbens.

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry
James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Sweden borgian theologian well acquainted
with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James
family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made
them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
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James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his
godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles
Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio
Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund
Freud.

Epistemology
Portrait of William James by John La Farge, circa 1859 James defined true beliefs as those
that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truth was a synthesis of
correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension.
Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things,
as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might
fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to
actual practice

"The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for
human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days
were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of
giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played
no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the
reason why they are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function," he
wrote.

James held a world view in line with pragmatism, declaring that the value of any truth was
utterly dependent upon its use to the person who held it. Additional tenets of James's
pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only
be properly interpreted and understood through an application of "radical empiricism."
Radical empiricism, not related to the everyday scientific empiricism, asserts that the world
and experience can never be halted for an entirely objective analysis, if nothing else the
mind of the observer and simple act of observation will affect the outcome of any empirical
approach to truth as the mind and its experiences, and nature are inseparable. James's
emphasis on diversity as the default human condition—over and against duality, especially
Hegelian dialectical duality—has maintained a strong influence in American culture,
especially among liberals (see Richard Rorty). James's description of the mind-world
connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness (psychology)", had
a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art.

In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth
is, in brief, that "Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to
them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on
indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the
function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them." Richard Rorty claims that
James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not
regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard
Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalist interpretation of James.
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In The Meaning of Truth, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's
[sc., the critic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true'
irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the
workings.' "However, James responded to critics accusing him of relativism, skepticism or
agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths. To the contrary, he supported an
epistemological realism position.

William Heard Kilpatrick (Date: 1871-1965)

William Heard Kilpatrick was a US American philosopher of education and a colleague and
a successor of John Dewey. He was a major figure in the progressive education movement
of the early 20th century. Kilpatrick developed the Project Method for early childhood
education, which was a form of Progressive Education organized curriculum and classroom
activities around a subject's central theme. He believed that the role of a teacher should be
that of a "guide" as opposed to an authoritarian figure. Kilpatrick believed that children
should direct their own learning according to their interests and should be allowed to
explore their environment, experiencing their learning through the natural
senses. Proponents of Progressive Education and the Project Method reject traditional
schooling that focuses on memorization, rote learning, strictly organized classrooms (desks
in rows; students always seated), and typical forms of assessment.

Nel Noddings (Date: 1929–)

Noddings' first sole-authored book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral
Education (1984) followed close on the 1982 publication of Carol Gilligan’s ground-breaking
work in the ethics of care In a Different Voice. While her work on ethics continued, with the
publication of Women and Evil (1989) and later works on moral education, most of her later
publications have been on the philosophy of education and educational theory. Her most
significant works in these areas have been Educating for Intelligent Belief or
Unbelief (1993) and Philosophy of Education (1995).

Richard Rorty (Date: October, 1931-June 8, 2007)

He was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including
positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of
Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative
Literature at Stanford University. Educated at the University and then Yale University, he
had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy, as well as contemporary
analytic philosophy, the latter being the main focus of his work at Princeton in the 1960s.
He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge is
a matter of correctly representing a world whose existence is wholly independent of those
representations. This idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" he correctly saw as
pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty
advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in
which scientific and philosophical methods are merely a set of contingent "vocabularies"
which were abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and
usefulness.
 12

Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed,

would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely
aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary.
For Rorty, this brand of philosophy is always tied to the notion of "social hope", that without
the representation accounts and without metaphors between the mind and the world,
human society would be more peaceful. He also emphasized the reasons why the
interpretation of culture as conversation(Bernstein:1971), would be the crucial concept of a
"post philosophical" culture that had been determined to abandon the representationalist
account of the traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that
considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism. His best known books
are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(1989).
Analytic Philosophy-Richard Stanley Peters (31 October 1919 - 30 December 2011)
was a British philosopher. His work belongs mainly to the areas of political theory,
philosophical psychology, and philosophy of education.

Biography

Peters was born 1919 in Mussoorie, India. He spent his childhood with his grandmother in
England. From 1933-1938 he was a student at Sidcot School in Winscombe. In the Second
World War he served in the Friends Ambulance Unit with Friends Relief Service from 1940
to 1944. From his marriage (1942) there were one son and two daughters.

Influence on the philosophy of education

Peters is known particularly for his work in the philosophy of the education. However his
early writings were occupied with psychology, more exactly with a philosophical view of
psychological issues. Thus his research was in the areas motivation, emotions, personality
as well as social behavior and the relationship between reason and longing. Perhaps the
most important work by Peters is "Ethics and Education". With this and his subsequent
publications he significantly influenced the development of the philosophy of education in
Great Britain and world-wide. The influence was a result of his examination of the concept
of education in the sense of analytic philosophy. Central tools thereby are term analysis.
Peters explores two substantial aspects of the philosophy of education: the normative and
the cognitive.

Existentialism-Karl Theodor Jaspers (23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969)

He was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on

modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing
psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative
philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent
of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept this label.

Contributions to philosophy and theology

 13

Most commentators associate Jaspers with the philosophy of existentialism, in part

because he draws largely upon the existentialist roots of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, and in
part because the theme of individual freedom permeates his work. In Philosophy (3 vols,
1932), Jaspers gave his view of the history of philosophy and introduced his major themes.
Beginning with modern science and empiricism, Jaspers points out that as we question
reality, we confront borders that an empirical (or scientific) method simply cannot transcend.
At this point, the individual faces a choice: sink into despair and resignation, or take a leap
of faith toward what Jaspers calls Transcendence. In making this leap, individuals confront
their own limitless freedom, which Jaspers calls Existenz, and can finally experience
authentic existence.

Transcendence (paired with the term The Encompassing in later works) is, for Jaspers, that
which exists beyond the world of time and space. Jaspers' formulation of Transcendence as
ultimate non-objectivity (or no-thing-ness) has led many philosophers to argue that
ultimately, Jaspers became a monist, though Jaspers himself continually stressed the
necessity of recognizing the validity of the concepts both of subjectivity and of objectivity.

Although he rejected explicit religious doctrines, including the notion of a personal God,
Jaspers influenced contemporary theology through his philosophy of transcendence and
the limits of human experience. Mystic Christian traditions influenced Jaspers himself
tremendously, particularly those of Meister Eckhart and of Nicholas of Cusa. He also took
an active interest in Eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, and developed the theory
of an Axial Age, a period of substantial philosophical and religious development. Jaspers
also entered public debates with Rudolf Bultmann, wherein Jaspers roundly criticized
Bultmann's "demythologizing" of Christianity.

Jaspers wrote extensively on the threat to human freedom posed by modern science and
modern economic and political institutions. During World War II, he had to abandon his
teaching post because his wife was Jewish. After the war he resumed his teaching position,
and in his work The Question of German Guilt he unabashedly examined the culpability of
Germany as a whole in the atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. The below quote of Jasper's
about the Second World War and its atrocities was used at the end of the sixth episode of
the BBC documentary series The Nazis: A Warning from History.

"That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually

remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen
again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented."

Jaspers’ major works, lengthy and detailed, can seem daunting in their complexity. His last
great attempt at a systematic philosophy of Existenz — Von Der Wahrheit (On Truth) —
has not yet appeared in English. However, he also wrote shorter works, most notably,
Philosophy is for Everyman. The two major proponents of phenomenological hermeneutics,
namely Paul Ricoeur (a student of Jaspers) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Jaspers's
successor at Heidelberg), both display Jaspers's influence in their works.

Critical Theory-Paulo Freire (Date: 1921-1997)

 14

A Brazilian committed to the cause of educating the impoverished peasants of his nation
and collaborating with them in the pursuit of their liberation from what he regarded as
"oppression," Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking concept of
education," in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the
teacher. Freire also suggests that a deep reciprocity be inserted into our notions of teacher
and student; he comes close to suggesting that the teacher-student dichotomy be
completely abolished, instead promoting the roles of the participants in the classroom as
the teacher-student (a teacher who learns) and the student-teacher (a learner who
teaches). In its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on
the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.

Aspects of the Freirian philosophy have been highly influential in academic debates over
"participatory development" and development more generally. Freire's emphasis on what he
describes as "emancipation" through interactive participation has been used as a rationale
for the participatory focus of development, as it is held that 'participation' in any form can
lead to empowerment of poor or marginalised groups. Freire was a proponent of critical
pedagogy. "He participated in the import of European doctrines and ideas into Brazil,
assimilated them to the needs of a specific socio-economic situation, and thus expanded
and refocused them in a thought-provoking way".

Postmodernism-Martin Heidegger (Date: 1889-1976)

Heidegger's philosophizing about education was primarily related to higher education. He
believed that teaching and research in the university should be unified and aim towards
testing and interrogating the "ontological assumptions presuppositions which implicitly guide
research in each domain of knowledge. He was a German philosopher known for his
existential and phenomenological exploration of the “question of Being”.

Heidegger maintained that philosophy, in the process of philosophizing, had lost sight of the
being it sought. Finding ourselves "always already" fallen in a world of presuppositions we
lose touch with what being was before its truth became "muddled". Our way of questioning
defines our nature. He advocated a return to the practical being in the world, allowing it to
reveal, or "unconceal" itself as concealment.

Writing extensively on Nietzsche in his later career, and offering a "phenomenological

critique of Kant" in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger is known for his
post. His best known book, Being and Time is considered one of the most important
philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's influence has been far reaching, from
philosophy to theology, deconstructionism, literary theory, architecture, and artificial
intelligence.

Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism, for which he never
apologized nor expressed regret, except in private when he called it "the biggest stupidity of
his life. The so-called Heidegger controversy raises general questions about the relation
between Heidegger's thought and his connection to National Socialism.

Normative Educational Philosophies

 15

"Normative philosophies or theories of education may make use of the results of

[philosophical thought] and of factual inquiries about human beings and the psychology of
learning, but in any case they propound views about what education should be, what
dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and in whom it should do
so, and what forms it should take. In a full-fledged philosophical normative theory of
education, besides analysis of the sorts described, there will normally be propositions of the
following kinds:

1. Basic normative premises about what is good or right;

2. Basic factual premises about humanity and the world;

3. Conclusions, based on these two kinds of premises, about the dispositions education
should foster;

4. Further factual premises about such things as the psychology of learning and methods of
teaching; and 5. Further conclusions about such things as the methods that education
should use."

Perennialism

Perennialists believe that one should teach the things that one deems to be of everlasting
importance to all people everywhere. They believe that the most important topics develop a
person. Since details of fact change constantly, these cannot be the most important.
Therefore, one should teach principles, not facts. Since people are human, one should
teach first about humans, not machines or techniques. Since people are people first, and
workers second if at all, one should teach liberal topics first, not vocational topics. The
focus is primarily on teaching reasoning and wisdom rather than facts, the liberal arts rather
than vocational training.

Allan Bloom (Date: 1930-1992)

Bloom, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argued for a traditional
Great-based liberal education in his lengthy essay The Closing of the American Mind.

Progressivism
Educational progressivism is the belief that education must be based on the principle that
humans are social animals who learn best in real-life activities with other people.
Progressivists, like proponents of most educational theories, claim to rely on the best
available scientific theories of learning. Most progressive educators believe that children
learn as if they were scientists, following a process similar to John Dewey's model of
learning: 1) Become aware of the problem. 2) Define the problem. 3) Propose hypotheses
to solve it. 4) Evaluate the consequences of the hypotheses from one's past experience. 5)
Test the likeliest solution.

Jean Piaget (Date: 1896-1980)

Jean Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies
with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together
 16

called "genetic epistemology". Piaget placed great importance on the education of children.
As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only
education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or
gradual." Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in
1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the
great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."

Jean Piaget described himself as an epistemologist, interested in the process of the

qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book "Genetic
Epistemology" (ISBN 978-0-393-00596-7): "What the genetic epistemology proposes is
discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms,
following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

Jerome Bruner (Date: 1915)

Another important contributor to the inquiry method in education is Bruner. His books The
Process of Education and Toward a Theory of Instruction are landmarks in conceptualizing
learning and curriculum development. He argued that any subject can be taught in some
intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. This notion was an
underpinning for his concept of the spiral curriculum which posited the idea that a
curriculum should revisit basic ideas, building on them until the student had grasped the full
formal concept. He emphasized intuition as a neglected but essential feature of productive
thinking. He felt that interest in the material being learned was the best stimulus for learning
rather than external motivation such as grades. Bruner developed the concept of discovery
learning which promoted learning as a process of constructing new ideas based on current
or past knowledge. Students are encouraged to discover facts and relationships and
continually build on what they already know.

Essentialism
Educational essentialism is an educational philosophy whose adherents believe that
children should learn the traditional basic subjects and that these should be learned
thoroughly and rigorously. An essentialist program normally teaches children progressively,
from less complex skills to more complex.

William Chandler Bagley (Date: 1874-1946)

William Chandler Bagley taught in elementary schools before becoming a professor of

education at the University of Illinois, where he served as the Director of the School of
Education from 1908 until 1917. He was a professor of education at Teachers College,
Columbia, from 1917 to 1940. An opponent of pragmatism and progressive education,
Bagley insisted on the value of knowledge for its own sake, not merely as an instrument,
and he criticized his colleagues for their failure to emphasize systematic study of academic
subjects. Bagley was a proponent of educational essentialism.

Social Reconstructionism and Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy is an "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help

students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and
 17

connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action." Based in Marxist
theory, critical pedagogy draws on radical democracy, anarchism, feminism, and other
movements for social justice.

Maria Montessori (Date: 1870-1952)

The Montessori Method arose from Dr. Maria Montessori's discovery of what she referred to
as "the child's true normal nature" in 1907, which happened in the process of her
experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment prepared with
materials designed for their self-directed learning activity. The method itself aims to
duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and support their
true natural way of being.

Waldorf

Waldorf education (also known as Steiner or Steiner-Waldorf education) is a humanistic

approach to pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating
practical, artistic, and conceptual elements. The approach emphasizes the role of the
imagination in learning, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic
component. The educational philosophy's overarching goals are to provide young people
the basis on which to develop into free, morally responsible and integrated individuals, and
to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy
posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within
collegial structures.

Rudolf Steiner (Date: 1861-1925)

Steiner founded a holistic educational impulse on the basis of his spiritual philosophy
(anthroposophy). Now known as Steiner or Waldorf education, his pedagogy emphasizes a
balanced development of cognitive, affective/artistic, and practical skills (head, heart, and
hands). Schools are normally self-administered by faculty; emphasis is placed upon giving
individual teachers the freedom to develop creative methods.

Steiner's theory of child development divides education into three discrete developmental
stages predating but with close similarities to the stages of development described
by Piaget. Early childhood education occurs through imitation; teachers provide practical
activities and a healthy environment. Steiner believed that young children should meet only
goodness. Elementary education is strongly arts-based, centered on the teacher's creative
authority; the elementary school-age child should meet beauty. Secondary education seeks
to develop the judgment, intellect, and practical idealism; the adolescent should meet truth.

Democratic Education

Democratic education is a theory of learning and school governance in which students and
staff participate freely and equally in a school democracy. In a democratic school, there is
typically shared decision-making among students and staff on matters concerning living,
working, and learning together.
 18

A. S. Neill (Date: 1883-1973)

Neill founded Summer hill School, the oldest existing democratic school in Suffolk, England
in 1921. He wrote a number of books that now define much of contemporary democratic
education philosophy. Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the
paramount consideration in decisions about the child's upbringing, and that this happiness
grew from a sense of personal freedom. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom
during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child,
was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.

Classical Education

The Classical education movement advocates a form of education based in the traditions of
Western culture, with a particular focus on education as understood and taught in the
middle Ages. The term "classical education" has been used in English for several centuries,
with each era modifying the definition and adding its own selection of topics. By the end of
the 18th century, in addition to the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages, the definition
of a classical education embraced study of literature, poetry, drama, philosophy, history, art,
and languages. In the 20th and 21st centuries it is used to refer to a broad-based study of
the liberal arts and sciences, as opposed to a practical or pre-professional program.
Classical Education can be described as rigorous and systematic, separating children and
their learning into three rigid categories, Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric.

Charlotte Mason (Date: 1842-1923)

Mason was a British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's
education. Her ideas led to a method used by some homeschoolers. Mason's philosophy of
education is probably best summarized by the principles given at the beginning of each of
her books. Two key mottos taken from those principles are "Education is an atmosphere, a
discipline, a life" and "Education is the science of relations." She believed that children were
born persons and should be respected as such; they should also be taught the Way of the
Will and the Way of Reason. Her motto for students was "I am, I can, I ought, I will."
Charlotte Mason believed that children should be introduced to subjects through living
books, not through the use of "compendiums, abstracts, or selections." She used abridged
books only when the content was deemed inappropriate for children. She preferred that
parents or teachers read aloud those texts (such as Plutarch and the Old Testament),
making omissions only where necessary.

Unschooling

Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on

allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child
directed play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social
interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum. Unschooling
encourages exploration of activities led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults.
Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that
standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of
 19

traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each
child.

John Holt

In 1964 Holt published his first book, How Children Fail, asserting that the academic failure
of schoolchildren was not despite the efforts of the schools, but actually because of the
schools. Not surprisingly, How Children Fail ignited a firestorm of controversy. Holt was
catapulted into the American national consciousness to the extent that he made
appearances on major TV talk shows, wrote book reviews for Life magazine, and was a
guest on the To Tell the Truth TV game show. In his follow-up work, How Children Learn,
published in 1967, Holt tried to elucidate the learning process of children and why he
believed school short circuits that process.

Contemplative education

Contemplative education focuses on bringing spiritual awareness into the pedagogical

process. Contemplative approaches may be used in the classroom, especially in tertiary or
(often in modified form) in secondary education. Parker Palmer is a recent pioneer in
contemplative methods. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society founded a branch
focusing on education, The Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.

Contemplative methods may also be used by teachers in their preparation; Waldorf

education was one of the pioneers of the latter approach. In this case, inspiration for
enriching the content, format, or teaching methods may be sought through various
practices, such as consciously reviewing the previous day's activities; actively holding the
students in consciousness; and contemplating inspiring pedagogical texts. Zigler suggested
that only through focusing on their own spiritual development could teachers positively
impact the spiritual development of students.

Jean Piaget (French: [ʒɑ̃ pjaʒɛ]; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a French-
speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological
studies with children. He was the eldest son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss) and Rebecca Jackson
(French). His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called
"genetic epistemology".

Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the
International, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies
from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual."

Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and
directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer
of the constructivist theory of knowing."

Career history
 20

Harry Beilin described Jean Piaget's theoretical research program as consisting of four
phases:

the sociological model of development,

the biological model of intellectual development,

the elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development,

The study of figurative thought.

The resulting theoretical frameworks are sufficiently different from each other that they have
been characterized as representing different "Piagets." More recently, Jeremy Burman
responded to Beilin and called for the addition of a phase before his turn to psychology: "the
zeroeth Piaget."

Piaget before psychology

Before Piaget became a psychologist, he trained in natural history and philosophy. He

received his doctorate in 1918 from the University of Neuchatel. He then undertook post-
doctoral training in Zurich (1918–1919), and Paris (1919–1921). The theorist we recognize
today only emerged when he moved to Geneva, to work for Edouard Claparede as director
of research at the Rousseau Institute, in 1922.

The sociological model of development

Piaget first developed as a psychologist in the 1920s. He investigated the hidden side of
children’s minds. Piaget proposed that children moved from a position
of egocentrism to sociocentrism. For this explanation he combined the use of psychological
and clinical methods to create what he called a semi clinical interview. He began the
interview by asking children standardized questions and depending on how they answered,
he would ask them a series of nonstandard questions. Piaget was looking for what he
called "spontaneous conviction" so he often asked questions the children neither expected
nor anticipated. In his studies, he noticed there was a gradual progression from intuitive to
scientific and socially acceptable responses. Piaget theorized children did this because of
the social interaction and the challenge to younger children’s ideas by the ideas of those
children who were more advanced.

This work was used by Elton Mayo as the basis for the famous Hawthorne
Experiments. For Piaget, it also led to an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1936.

The sensorimotor/adaptive model of intellectual development

In this stage, Piaget described intelligence as having two closely interrelated parts. The first
part, which is from the first stage, was the content of children's thinking. The second part
was the process of intellectual activity. He believed this process of thinking could be
regarded as an extension of the biological process of adaptation. Adaptation has two
pieces: assimilation and accommodation. To test his theory, Piaget observed the habits in
his own children. He argued infants were engaging in an act of assimilation when they
sucked on everything in their reach. He claimed infants transform all objects into an object
 21

to be sucked. The children were assimilating the objects to conform to their own mental
structures. Piaget then made the assumption that whenever one transforms the world to
meet individual needs or conceptions, one is, in a way, assimilating it. Piaget also observed
his children not only assimilating objects to fit their needs, but also modifying some of their
mental structures to meet the demands of the environment. This is the second division of
adaptation known as accommodation. To start out, the infants only engaged in primarily
reflex actions such as sucking, but not long after, they would pick up actual objects and put
them in their mouths. When they do this, they modify their reflex response to accommodate
the external objects into reflex actions. Because the two are often in conflict, they provide
the impetus for intellectual development. The constant need to balance the two triggers
intellectual growth.

The elaboration of the logical model of intellectual development

In the model Piaget developed in stage three, he argued the idea that intelligence develops
in a series of stages that are related to age and are progressive because one stage must
be accomplished before the next can occur. For each stage of development the child forms
a view of reality for that age period. At the next stage, the child must keep up with earlier
level of mental abilities to reconstruct concepts. Piaget concluded intellectual development
as an upward expanding spiral in which children must constantly reconstruct the ideas
formed at earlier levels with new, higher order concepts acquired at the next level.

It is primarily the Third Piaget that was incorporated into American psychology when
Piaget's ideas were "rediscovered" in the 1960s.

The study of figurative thought

Piaget studied areas of intelligence like perception and memory that aren’t entirely logical.
Logical concepts are described as being completely reversible because they can always
get back to the starting point. The perceptual concepts Piaget studied could not be
manipulated. To describe the figurative process, Piaget uses pictures as examples.
Pictures can’t be separated because contours cannot be separated from the forms they
outline. Memory is the same way. It is never completely reversible. During this last period of
work, Piaget and his colleague Inhelder also published books on perception, memory, and
other figurative processes such as learning.

Theory

Jean Piaget defined himself as a 'genetic' epistemologist, interested in the process of the
qualitative development of knowledge. As he says in the introduction of his book Genetic
Epistemology (ISBN 978-0-393-00596-7): "What the genetic epistemology proposes is
discovering the roots of the different varieties of knowledge, since its elementary forms,
following to the next levels, including also the scientific knowledge."

He believed answers for the epistemological questions at his time could be answered, or
better proposed, if one looked to the genetic aspect of it, hence his experimentations with
children and adolescents. Piaget considered cognitive structures development as a
differentiation of biological regulations. In one of his last books, Equilibration of Cognitive
Structures: The Central Problem of Intellectual Development (ISBN 978-022666781), he
 22

intends to explain knowledge development as a process of equilibration using two main

concepts in his theory, assimilation and accommodation, as belonging not only to biological
interactions but also to cognitive ones.

Stages

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as:

Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2. Children experience the world through movement
and senses (use five senses to explore the world). During the sensorimotor stage children
are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints.
The sensorimotor stage is divided into six sub stages:

I. "simple reflexes;
II. first habits and primary circular reactions;
III. secondary circular reactions;
IV. coordination of secondary circular reactions;
V. tertiary circular reactions, novelty, and curiosity; and
VI. Internalization of schemes."

Simple reflexes are from birth to 1 month old. At this time infants use reflexes such as
rooting and sucking.

First habits and primary circular reactions are from 1 month to 4 months old. During this
time infants learn to coordinate sensation and two types of scheme (habit and circular
reactions). A primary circular reaction is when the infant tries to reproduce an event that
happened by accident (ex: sucking thumb).

The third stage, secondary circular reactions, occurs when the infant is 4 to 8 months old.
At this time they become aware of things beyond their own body; they are more object
oriented. At this time they might accidentally shake a rattle and continue to do it for sake of
satisfaction.

Coordination of secondary circular reactions is from 8 months to 12 months old. During this
stage they can do things intentionally. They can now combine and recombine schemes and
try to reach a goal (ex: use a stick to reach something). They also understand object
permanence during this stage. That is, they understand that objects continue to exist even
when they can't see them.

The fifth stage occurs from 12 months old to 18 months old. During this stage infants
explore new possibilities of objects; they try different things to get different results.

Some followers of Piaget's studies of infancy, such as Kenneth Kaye argue that his
contribution was as an observer of countless phenomena not previously described, but that
he didn't offer explanation of the processes in real time that cause those developments,
beyond analogizing them to broad concepts about biological adaptation generally. Kaye's
"apprenticeship theory" of cognitive and social development refuted Piaget's assumption
that mind developed endogenously in infants until the capacity for symbolic reasoning
allowed them to learn language.
 23

Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (magical thinking predominates; motor skills are
acquired). Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or
use logical thinking.

Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically but are
very concrete in their thinking). Children can now conserve and think logically but only with
practical aids. They are no longer egocentric.

Formal operational stage: from age 11-16 and onwards (development of abstract
reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in
their mind.

The developmental process

Piaget provided no concise description of the development process as a whole. Broadly

speaking it consisted of a cycle:

The child performs an action which has an effect on or organizes objects, and the child is
able to note the characteristics of the action and its effects.

Through repeated actions, perhaps with variations or in different contexts or on different

kinds of objects, the child is able to differentiate and integrate its elements and effects. This
is the process of "reflecting abstraction" (described in detail in Piaget 2001).

At the same time, the child is able to identify the properties of objects by the way different
kinds of action affect them. This is the process of "empirical abstraction".

By repeating this process across a wide range of objects and actions, the child establishes
a new level of knowledge and insight. This is the process of forming a new
"cognitive stage". This dual process allows the child to construct new ways of dealing with
objects and new knowledge about objects themselves.

However, once the child has constructed these new kinds of knowledge, he or she starts to
use them to create still more complex objects and to carry out still more complex actions.
As a result, the child starts to recognize still more complex patterns and to construct still
more complex objects. Thus a new stage begins, which will only be completed when all the
child's activity and experience have been re-organized on this still higher level.

This process may not be wholly gradual, but new evidence shows that the passage into
new stages is more gradual than once thought. Once a new level of organization,
knowledge and insight proves to be effective, it will quickly be generalized to other areas if
they exist. As a result, transitions between stages can seem to be rapid and radical, but
oftentimes the child has grasped one aspect of the new stage of cognitive functioning but
not addressed others. The bulk of the time spent in a new stage consists of refining this
new cognitive level however it is not always happening quickly. For example, a child may
learn that two different colors of Play-Doh have been fused together to make one ball,
based on the color. However, if sugar is mixed into water or iced tea, then the sugar
"disappeared" and therefore does not exist. These levels of one concept of cognitive
 24

development are not realized all at once, giving us a gradual realization of the world around
us.

It is because this process takes this dialectical form, in which each new stage is created
through the further differentiation, integration, and synthesis of new structures out of the
old, that the sequence of cognitive stages are logically necessary rather than simply
empirically correct. Each new stage emerges only because the child can take for granted
the achievements of its predecessors, and yet there are still more sophisticated forms of
knowledge and action that are capable of being developed.

Because it covers both how we gain knowledge about objects and our reflections on our
own actions, Piaget's model of development explains a number of features of human
knowledge that had never previously been accounted for. For example, by showing how
children progressively enrich their understanding of things by acting on and reflecting on the
effects of their own previous knowledge, they are able to organize their knowledge in
increasingly complex structures. Thus, once a young child can consistently and accurately
recognize different kinds of animals, he or she then acquires the ability to organize the
different kinds into higher groupings such as "birds", "fish", and so on. This is significant
because they are now able to know things about a new animal simply on the basis of the
fact that it is a bird – for example, that it will lay eggs.

At the same time, by reflecting on their own actions, the child develops an increasingly
sophisticated awareness of the "rules" that govern in various ways. For example, it is by
this route that Piaget explains this child's growing awareness of notions such as "right",
"valid", "necessary", "proper", and so on. In other words, it is through the process
of objectification, reflection and abstraction that the child constructs the principles on which
action is not only effective or correct but also justified.

One of Piaget's most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of
children between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He
began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of sweets, one
with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the same number of sweets in a
line placed more closely together. He found that, "Children between 2 years, 6 months old
and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows;
between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer
objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly" (Cognitive
Capacity of Very Young Children, p. 141). Initially younger children were not studied,
because if at four years old a child could not conserve quantity, then a younger child
presumably could not either. The results show however that children that are younger than
three years and two months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this
quality, and do not recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute may be lost due to
a temporary inability to solve because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies,
which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or due to the inability for a four
year old to reverse situations.

By the end of this experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a
discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier
 25

than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children can be equipped with
certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on how logical the structure of the task
is. Research also shows that children develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a
result, the child will count the sweets to decide which has more. Finally the study found that
overall quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of humans' native inheritance.

Genetic epistemology
According to Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology "attempts to explain knowledge, and in
particular scientific knowledge, on the basis of its history, its sociogenesis, and especially
the psychological origins of the notions and operations upon which it is based". Piaget
believed he could test epistemological questions by studying the development of thought
and action in children. As a result Piaget created a field known as genetic epistemology
with its own methods and problems. He defined this field as the study of child
development as a means of answering epistemological questions.

Schemata

A Schema is a structured cluster of concepts, it can be used to represent objects, scenarios

or sequences of events or relations. The original idea was proposed by philosopher
Immanuel Kant as innate structures used to help us perceive the world.

A schema (pl. schemata) is the mental framework that is created as children interact with
their physical and social environments. For example, many 3-year-olds insist that the sun is
alive because it comes up in the morning and goes down at night. According to Piaget,
these children are operating based on a simple cognitive schema that things that move are
alive. At any age, children rely on their current cognitive structures to understand the world
around them. Moreover, younger and older children may often interpret and respond to the
same objects and events in very different ways because cognitive structures take different
forms at different ages.

Piaget (1953) described three kinds of intellectual structures: behavioural (or sensorimotor)
schemata, symbolic schemata, and operational schemata.

Behavioural schemata: organized patterns of behaviour that are used to represent and
respond to objects and experiences.

Symbolic schemata: internal mental symbols (such as images or verbal codes) that one
uses to represent aspects of experience.

Operational schemata: internal mental activity that one performs on objects of thought.

According to Piaget, children use the process of assimilation and accommodation to create
a schema or mental framework for how they perceive and/or interpret what they are
experiencing. As a result, the early concepts of young children tend to be more global or
general in nature.

Similarly, Gallagher and Reid (1981) maintained that adults view children’s concepts as
highly generalized and even inaccurate. With added experience, interactions, and maturity,
 26

these concepts become refined and more detailed. Overall, making sense of the world from
a child’s perspective is a very complex and time-consuming process.

Schemata are:

Critically important building block of conceptual development

Constantly in the process of being modified or changed

Modified by on-going experiences

A generalized idea, usually based on experience or prior knowledge.

These schemata are constantly being revised and elaborated upon each time the child
encounters new experiences. In doing this children create their own unique understanding
of the world, interpret their own experiences and knowledge, and subsequently use this
knowledge to solve more complex problems. In a neurological sense, the brain/mind is
constantly working to build and rebuild itself as it takes in, adapts/modifies new information,
and enhances understanding.

The physical microstructure of "schemes"

In his Biology and Knowledge (1967+ / French 1965), Piaget tentatively hinted at possible
physical embodiments for his abstract "scheme" entities. At the time, there was much talk
and research about RNA as such an agent of learning, and Piaget considered some of the
evidence. However, he did not offer any firm conclusions, and confessed that this was
beyond his area of expertise. Piaget died in 1980, and by then the RNA theory had lost its
appeal.

Research methods

Piaget wanted to revolutionize the way research methods were conducted. Although he
started researching with his colleagues using a traditional method of data collection, he was
not fully satisfied with the results and wanted to keep trying to find new ways of researching
using a combination of data, which included: naturalistic observation, psychometrics, and
the psychiatric clinical examination, in order to have a less guided form of research that
would produce more genuine results. As Piaget developed new research methods, he
wrote a book called The Language and Thought of the Child, which aimed to synthesize the
methods he was using in order to study the conclusion children drew from situations and
how they arrived to such conclusion. The main idea was to observe how children
responded and articulated certain situations with their own reasoning, in order to examine
their thought processes (Mayer, 2005).

Piaget administered a test in 15 boys with ages ranging from 10–14 years-old in which he
asked participants to describe the relationship between a mix bouquet of flowers and a
bouquet with flowers of the same color. The purpose of this study was to analyze the
thinking process the boys had and to draw conclusions about the logic processes they had
used, which was a psychometric technique of research. Piaget also used the
psychoanalytic method initially developed by Sigmund Freud. The purpose of using such
method was to examine the unconscious mind, as well as to continue parallel studies using
 27

different research methods. Psychoanalysis was later rejected by Piaget, as he thought it

was insufficiently empirical (Mayer, 2005).

Piaget argued that children and adults used speech for different purposes. In order to
confirm his argument, he experimented analyzing a child’s interpretation of a story. In the
experiment, the child listened to a story and then told a friend that same story in his/her own
words. The purpose of this study was to examine how children verbalize and understand
each other without adult intervention. Piaget wanted to examine the limits of naturalistic
observation, in order to understand a child’s reasoning. He realized the difficulty of studying
children's thoughts, as it is hard to know if a child is pretending to believe their thoughts or
not. Piaget was the pioneer researcher to examine children’s conversations in a social
context - starting from examining their speech and actions - where children were
comfortable and spontaneous (Kose, 1987).

Issues and possible solutions

After conducting many studies, Piaget was able to find significant differences in the way
adults and children reason; however, he was still unable to find the path of logic reasoning
and the unspoken thoughts children had, which could allow him to study a child’s
intellectual development over time (Mayer, 2005). In his third book, The Child’s Conception
of the World, Piaget recognized the difficulties of his prior techniques and the importance of
psychiatric clinical examination. The researcher believed that the way clinical examinations
were conducted influenced how a child’s inner realities surfaced. Children would likely
respond according to the way the research is conducted, the questions asked, or the
familiarity they have with the environment. The clinical examination conducted for his third
book provides a thorough investigation into a child’s thinking process. An example of a
question used to research such process was: "Can you see a thought?" (Mayer, 2005,
p. 372).

Development of new methods

Piaget recognized that psychometric tests had its limitations, as children were not able to
provide the researcher with their deepest thoughts and inner intellect. It was also difficult to
know if the results of child examination reflected what children believed or if it is just a
pretend situation. For example, it is very difficult to know with certainty if a child who has a
conversation with a toy believes the toy is alive or if the child is just pretending. Soon after
drawing conclusions about psychometric studies, Piaget started developing the clinical
method of examination. The clinical method included questioning a child and carefully
examining their responses -in order to observe how the child reasoned according to the
questions asked - and then examine the child’s perception of the world through their
responses. Piaget recognized the difficulties of interviewing a child and the importance of
recognizing the difference between "liberated" versus "spontaneous" responses (Mayer,
2005, p. 372).

Criticism of Piaget's research methods

"The developmental theory of Jean Piaget has been criticized on the grounds that it is
conceptually limited, empirically false, or philosophically and epistemologically untenable."
 28

(Lourenço & Machado, 1996, p. 143) Piaget responded to criticism by acknowledging that
the vast majority of critics did not understand the outcomes he wished to obtain from his
research (Lourenço & Machado, 1996).

As Piaget believed development was a universal process, his initial sample sizes were
inadequate, particularly in the formulation of his theory of infant development. Piaget’s
theories of infant development were based on his observations of his own three children.
While this clearly presents problems with the sample size, Piaget also probably introduced
confounding variables and social desirability into his observations and his conclusions
based on his observations. It is entirely possible Piaget conditioned his children to respond
in a desirable manner, so, rather than having an understanding of object permanence, his
children might have learned to behave in a manner that indicated they understood object
permanence. The sample was also very homogenous, as all three children had a similar
genetic heritage and environment. Piaget did, however, have larger sample sizes during his
later years.

Development of research methods

Piaget wanted to research in environments that would allow children to connect with some
existing aspects of the world. The idea was to change the approach described in his
book The Child’s Conception of the World and move away from the vague questioning
interviews. This new approach was described in his book The Child’s Conception of
Physical Causality, where children were presented with dilemmas and had to think of
possible solutions on their own. Later, after carefully analyzing previous methods, Piaget
developed a combination of naturalistic observation with clinical interviewing in his
book Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, where a child's intellect was tested with
questions and close monitoring. Piaget was convinced he had found a way to analyze and
access a child’s thoughts about the world in a very effective way. (Mayer, 2005) Piaget’s
research provided a combination of theoretical and practical research methods and it has
offered a crucial contribution to the field of developmental psychology (Beilin, 1992). "Piaget
is often criticized because his method of investigation, though somewhat modified in recent
years, is still largely clinical". He observes a child's surroundings and behavior. He then
comes up with a hypothesis testing it and focusing on both the surroundings and behavior
after changing a little of the surrounding. (Phillips, 1969)

Influence

Despite his ceasing to be a fashionable psychologist, the magnitude of Piaget's continuing

influence can be measured by the global scale and activity of the Jean Piaget Society,
which holds annual conferences and attracts very large numbers of participants. His theory
of cognitive development has proved influential in many different areas:

Developmental psychology

Education and Morality

Historical studies of thought and cognition

Evolution
 29

Philosophy

Primatology

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Developmental psychology

Piaget is without doubt one of the most influential developmental psychologists, influencing
not only the work of Lev Vygotsky and of Lawrence Kohlberg but whole generations of
eminent academics. Although subjecting his ideas to massive scrutiny led to innumerable
improvements and qualifications of his original model and the emergence of a plethora of
neo-Piagetian and post-Piagetian variants, Piaget's original model has proved to be
remarkably robust (Lourenço and Machado 1996).

Education and development of morality

During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget's works also inspired the transformation of European
and American education, including both theory and practice, leading to a more ‘child-
centered’ approach. In Conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most
people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society ... but for
me and no one else, education means making creators... You have to make inventors,
innovators—not conformists" (Bringuier, 1980, p. 132).

His theory of cognitive development can be used as a tool in the early childhood classroom.
According to Piaget, children developed best in a classroom with interaction.

Piaget defined knowledge as the ability to modify, transform, and "operate on" an object or
idea, such that it is understood by the operator through the process of
transformation Learning, then, occurs as a result of experience, both physical and logical,
with the objects themselves and how they are acted upon. Thus, knowledge must be
assimilated in an active process by a learner with matured mental capacity, so that
knowledge can build in complexity by scaffold understanding. Understanding is scaffold by
the learner through the process of equilibration, whereby the learner balances new
knowledge with previous understanding, thereby compensating for "transformation" of
knowledge.

Learning, then, can also be supported by instructors in an educational setting. Piaget

specified that knowledge cannot truly be formed until the learner has matured the mental
structures to which that learning is specific, and thereby development constrains learning.
Nevertheless, knowledge can also be "built" by building on simpler operations and
structures that have already been formed. Basing operations of an advanced structure on
those of simpler structures thus scaffolds learning to build on operational abilities as they
develop. Good teaching, then, is built around the operational abilities of the students such
that they can excel in their operational stage and build on preexisting structures and
abilities and thereby "build" learning.

Evidence of the effectiveness of a contemporary curricular design building on Piaget's

theories of developmental progression and the support of maturing mental structures can
 30

be seen in Griffin and Case's "Number Worlds" curriculum. The curriculum works toward
building a "central conceptual structure" of number sense in young children by building on
five instructional processes, including aligning curriculum to the developmental sequencing
of acquisition of specific skills. By outlining the developmental sequence of number sense,
a conceptual structure is build and aligned to individual children as they develop.

Piaget's influence is strongest in early education and moral education.

Piaget believed in two basic principles relating to moral education: that children develop
moral ideas in stages and that children create their conceptions of the world. According to
Piaget, "the child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas
about right and wrong, and fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching
and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary" (Gallagher, 1978,
p. 26). Piaget believed that children made moral judgments based on their own
observations of the world.

Piaget's theory of morality was radical when his book, The Moral Judgment of the Child,
was published in 1932 for two reasons: his use of philosophical criteria to define morality
(as universalizable, generalizable, and obligatory) and his rejection of equating norms with
moral norms. Piaget, drawing on Kantian theory, proposed that morality developed out of
peer interaction and that it was autonomous from authority mandates. Peers, not parents,
were a key source of moral concepts such as equality, reciprocity, and justice.

Piaget attributed different types of psychosocial processes to different forms of

social relationships, introducing a fundamental distinction between different types of said
relationships. Where there is constraint because one participant holds more power than the
other the relationship is asymmetrical, and, importantly, the knowledge that can be acquired
by the dominated participant takes on a fixed and inflexible form. Piaget refers to this
process as one of social transmission, illustrating it through reference to the way in which
the elders of a tribe initiate younger members into the patterns of beliefs and practices of
the group. Similarly, where adults exercise a dominating influence over the growing child, it
is through social transmission that children can acquire knowledge. By contrast,
incooperative relations, power is more evenly distributed between participants so that a
more symmetrical relationship emerges. Under these conditions, authentic forms of
intellectual exchange become possible; each partner has the freedom to project his or her
own thoughts, consider the positions of others, and defend his or her own point of view. In
such circumstances, where children’s thinking is not limited by a dominant influence, Piaget
believed "the reconstruction of knowledge", or favorable conditions for the emergence of
constructive solutions to problems, exists. Here the knowledge that emerges is open,
flexible and regulated by the logic of argument rather than being determined by an external
authority. In short, cooperative relations provide the arena for the emergence of operations,
which for Piaget requires the absence of any constraining influence, and is most often
illustrated by the relations that form between peers (for more on the importance of this
distinction see Duveen & Psaltis, 2008; Psaltis & Duveen, 2006, 2007). This distinction
acquired central importance in Jürgen Habermas' writings on communicative action.

Piaget and the Cognitivists

 31

The Cognitivists include Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner. Cognitivist (learning theory) is the
theory that humans generate knowledge and meaning through sequential development of
an individual’s cognitive abilities, such the mental processes of recognize, recall, analyze,
reflect, apply, create, understand, and evaluate. The Cognitivists' (e.g.
Piaget), Bruner: Vygotsky learning process is adoptive learning of techniques, procedures,
organization, and structure to develop internal cognitive structure that strengthens
synapses in the brain. The learner requires assistance to develop prior knowledge and
integrate new knowledge. The purpose in education is to develop conceptual knowledge,
techniques, procedures, and algorithmic problem solving using Verbal/Linguistic and
Logical/Mathematical intelligences. The learner requires scaffolding to develop schema and
adopt knowledge from both people and the environment. The educators' role is pedagogical
in that the instructor must develop conceptual knowledge by managing the content of
learning activities. This theory relates to early stages of learning where the learner solves
well defined problems through a series of stages with assistance from an instructor. Jean
Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theory sequenced learning according to infancy [age 0-
2: sensor motor], preschool [age 2-7: preoperational], childhood [age 7-11: concrete
operational] and adolescence [age 11+: formal operational]. According to Piaget, the ability
to learn a concept is related to a child’s stage of intellectual development. Through a series
of stages, Piaget explains the ways in which characteristics are constructed that lead to
specific types of thinking. This focus on scaffold early learning and sequential development
of mental processes defines the Cognitivists' learning theory.

Historical studies of thought and cognition

Historical changes of thought have been modeled in Piagetian terms. Broadly speaking
these models has mapped changes in morality, intellectual life and cognitive levels against
historical changes (typically in the complexity of social systems).

Notable examples include:

Michael Horace Barnes' study of the co-evolution of religious and scientific thinking

Peter Damerow's theory of prehistoric and archaic thought

Kieran Egan's stages of understanding

James W. Fowler's stages of faith development

Suzy Gablik's stages of art history

Christopher Hallpike's studies of changes in cognition and moral judgment in pre-historical,

archaic and classical periods ... (Hallpike 1979, 2004)

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development

Don Lepan's theory of the origins of modern thought and drama

Charles Radding's theory of the medieval intellectual development

Jürgen Habermas's reworking of historical materialism.

 32

Non-human development

Neo-Piagetian stages have been applied to the maximum stage attained by various
animals. For example spiders attain the circular sensory motor stage, coordinating actions
and perceptions. Pigeons attain the sensory motor stage, forming concepts.

Origins

The origins of human intelligence have also been studied in Piagetian terms. Wynn (1979,
1981) analysed Acheulian and Oldowan tools in terms of the insight into spatial
relationships required creating each kind. On a more general level, Robinson's Birth of
Reason(2005) suggests a large-scale model for the emergence of a Piagetian intelligence.

Primatology

Piaget's models of cognition have also been applied outside the human sphere, and some
primatologists assess the development and abilities of primates in terms of Piaget's model.

Philosophy

Some have taken into account of Piaget's work. For example, the philosopher and social
theorist Jürgen Habermas has incorporated Piaget into his work, most notably in The
Theory of Communicative Action. The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work
with helping him to understand the transition between modes of thought which
characterized his theory of paradigm shifts. Yet, that said, it is also noted that the
implications of his later work do indeed remain largely unexamined. Shortly before his death
(September, 1980), Piaget was involved in a debate about the relationships between innate
and acquired features of language, at the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de
l'Homme, where he discussed his point of view with the linguist Noam Chomsky as well
as Hilary Putnam and Stephen Toulmin.

Artificial intelligence

Piaget also had a considerable effect in the field of computer science and artificial
intelligence. Seymour Papert used Piaget's work while developing the Logo programming
language. Alan Kay used Piaget's theories as the basis for the Dynabook programming
system concept, which was first discussed within the confines of the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, or Xerox PARC. These discussions led to the development of
the Alto prototype, which explored for the first time all the elements of the graphical user
interface (GUI), and influenced the creation of user interfaces in the 1980s and beyond.

Gary Drescher's Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence

Challenges

Piaget's theory, however vital in understanding child psychology, did not go without
scrutiny. A main figure whose ideas contradicted Piaget's ideas was the Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky stressed the importance of a child's cultural
background as an effect to the stages of development. Because different cultures stress
different social interactions, this challenged Piaget's theory that the hierarchy of learning
 33

development had to develop in succession. Vygotsky introduced the term Zone of proximal
development as an overall task a child would have to develop that would be too difficult to
develop alone.

Also, the so-called neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development maintained that

Piaget's theory does not do justice either to the underlying mechanisms of information
processing that explain transition from stage to stage or individual differences in cognitive
development. According to these theories, changes in information processing mechanisms,
such as speed of processing and working memory, are responsible for ascension from
stage to stage. Moreover, differences between individuals in these processes explain why
some individuals develop faster than other individuals (Demetriou, 1998).

Curiously, Piaget had published a novel at the age of 20, before he'd begun any research in
psychology, in which he stated what would later be the "conclusions" from decades of
studying the development of intelligence in children.

Over time, alternative theories of Child Development have been put forward, and empirical
findings have done a lot to undermine Piaget's theories. For example Esther Thelen and
colleagues found that babies would not make the A-not-B error if they had small weights
added to their arms during the first phase of the experiment that were then removed before
the second phase of the experiment. This minor change should not impact babies'
understanding of object permanence, so the difference that this makes to babies'
performance on the A-not-B task cannot be explained by Piagetian theory. Thelen and
colleagues also found that various other factors also influenced performance on the A-not-B
task (including strength of memory trace, salience of targets, waiting time and stance), and
proposed that this could be better explained using a dynamic systems theory approach than
using Piagetian theory. Alison Gopnik and Betty Repacholi found that babies as young as
18 months old can understand that other people have desires, and that these desires could
be very different to their own desires. This strongly contradicts Piaget's view that children
are very egocentric at this age.