Language and the Thought of the Child

“Piaget’s stages of child development have largely stood the test of time, and his impact on pre-school and school education has been great. Yet Piaget never considered himself a child psychologist, and was more accurately a scientist focused on theories of knowledge. His observation of children led to broader theories on communication and cognition, because what he learned about the child’s mind threw the adult’s into clearer view. For instance, it was not only children who used schemas to make sense of the world – we adults also have to accommodate and assimilate new information by conforming it to what we know already.

Piaget invented the field of ‘genetic epistemology’, which means how theories of knowledge evolve or change in relation to new information”. – Written by Tom Butler-Bowdon for 50 Classics of Psychology.

“The importance of this remarkable work deserves to be doubly emphasized, for its novelty consists both in the results obtained and in the method by which they have been reached”. – Excerpt from Professor E. Claparede’s Foreword.