Entrevista com Jean Piaget

    Biólogo, nascido em Newchatel – Suíça (09/08/1896 - 16/09/1980). Pesquisador e estudioso intelectual. Através do método clínico, Piaget nos trouxe a gênese das estruturas lógicas do pensamento da criança. Suas pesquisas o levaram da biologia à filosofia e psicologia, aproximando progressivamente a biologia a cibernética, a psicologia e a matemática para explicar o desenvolvimento da inteligência.

  Apesar de naturalista, começou explorar outros campos, principalmente a sistemática dos processos mentais, entrando em contato com grandes mestres da psiquiatria e psicanálise na Alemanha e França. 

    Em Paris, estagiou no Instituto Binet, onde ficou encarregado pela padronização francesa de alguns testes ingleses.

ENTREVISTA COM JEAN PIAGET
(CEDIDO PELA UNIVERSIDADE DE GENEBRA-ARQUIVO JEAN PIAGET)

A CONVERSATION WITH JEAN PIAGET 

By Elizabeth Hall

JEAN PIAGET

   The giant of developmental psychology and his collaborator talk about children – how they learn, what they learn.

  Jean Piaget: I must warn you that I cannot understand English when it is pronounced properly. If you will say zis and zat and zhose, I will be able to follow you.

Elizabeth Hall: And if you promisse to speak French wretchedly, I might understand you. But luckily we have Guy Cellerier here to solve our language problems.

You and Sigmund Freud are regarded as the two giants of 20^th-Century philosophy. If Freud has changed our thinking about personality, you have certainly changed our thinking about intelligence, yet a great deal of confusion surronds your work. Whenever someone tries to explain your theories to the rest of us, he succeeds only in obscuring them.

Piaget: Yes, I’ve seen that done. Perhaps we will do better today.

Hall: It is interesting that both Fred Skinner and D. O. Hebb intended to become novelists.

Piaget: Is that so?

Hall: I was surprised myself when I first heard it. They regard intelligence empirically, while you began as a natural scientist and look at intelligence philosophically.

Piaget: First we must agree on what you mean by philosophical. All the problems I have attacked are epistemological. All the methods I have used are either experimental or formalizations that Americans would also regard as empirical.

Hall: Psychology was originally a part of philosophy; William James was a philosopher. You have raided the field of philosophy again and captured the area of epistemology.

Piaget: It is true that I have taken epistemology away from philosophy, but I have not taken it only for psychology. It belongs in all the sciences; they are all concerned with the nature and origin of knowledge.

Hall: What caused you to turn from biology and the study of mollusks to epistemology?

Piaget: I began to study mollusks when I was 10. The director of the Museum of Natural History in Neuchâtel, who was a mollusk specialist, invited me to assist him twice a week. I helped him stick labels on his shell collection and he taught me malacology. I began publishing articles about shells when I was 15.

Hall: That’s quite young to be publishing scientific papers.

Piaget: Specialists in malacology are rare. Because I was so young, I had to decline invitations form foreign specialists who wanted to meet me. My first paper – a one-page report of a part-albino sparrow I had seen – was published when I was only 10. It was about the time that I began to publish articles on shells that I found a book on philosophy in my father’s library. My new passion for philosophy was encouraged when my godfather introduced me to Henri Bergson’s creative evolution. Suddenly the problem of Knowledge appeared to me in a new light. I became convinced, very quickly that most of the problems in philosophy were problems of knowledge, and that most problems of knowledge were problems of biology. You see, the problem of knowledge is the problem of the relation between the subject and the object – how the subject knows the object. If you translate this into biological terms, it is a problem of the organism’s adapting to its environment. I decided to consecrate my life to this biological explanation of knowledge.

Hall: With your interest in the relation between the subject and the object, I am surprised that you did not become a Gestalt psychologist.

Piaget: If I had come across the writings of Max Wertheimer and of Wolfgang Kohler when I was 18, I would have. But I was reading psychology only in French, so I was unacquainted with their work.

Hall: In your autobiography, you said that your natural-history background provided protection against the demon of philosophy.

Piaget: The domon of philosophy is taking the easy way out. You believe that you can solve problems by sitting in your office and reasoning them out. Because I was a biologist I knew that deductions must be made from facts.

Hall: But after you establish the facts, then you go back to your office and work out the problem.

Piaget: Yes. Now, if you don’t have a philosophical outlook, you probably won’t be a good scientist. Abstract reflection is fundamental to seeing problems clearly. But the error of philosophy – its demon – is to believe that you can go ahead and solve the problem you formulated in the office without going into the field and establishing the facts.

Hall: You once wrote that you detested any departure from reality.

Piaget: That was because of my mother’s poor mental health. At the beginning of my studies in psychology, I was interested in psychoanalysis and pathological psychology because of her. But I always preferred the workings of the intellect to the tricks of the unconscious.

Hall: Does your dislike of unreality extend to literature?

Piaget: Oh, no. I read many novels – and I even wrote a philosophical novel many years ago. Novels are not pathological.

Hall: I understand that your study of intelligence came about when you tried to standardize reasoning tests at Alfred Binet’s laboratory school in Paris.

Piaget: It was Binet’s school, but I was not working on Binet’s test. My task was to standardize Cyril Burt’s tests on the children of Paris. I never actually did it. Standardization was not at all interesting; I preferred to study the errors on the test. I became interested in the reasoning process behind the children’s wrong answers.

Hall: Has anyone tried to develop an intelligence test based on your research?

Piaget: That kind of research is going on in two places right now. Here at the University of Geneva, VichBang – a Vietnamese psychologist – is working on a test. And Monique laurendeau and Adrien Pinard, two psychologists at the University of Montreal, have been using my experimental methods and giving all the various tests to a single child. Just now they are back-checking to see if their experiments and mine produce similar results, and they are publishing volumes on different aspects of the experiments.

Hall: Would such a test have to be na individual test, ou could it be given to a group of children at one time?

Piaget: The hope is that we will have a battery of tests that can be given to a group of children together. The risk is that we will get deformed answers.

Hall: Isn’t a group test more likely to run aground on the same shoals that wrech the standard tests – a reliance on the answer instead of the method of reasoning?

Piaget: The difference will be that the clinical method will already have been used in studying the reasoning of children at each stage of development. We will have a background to help interpret the answers. It will have advantages that the I.Q. test lacks because the method of reasoning is unknown.

Hall: Your research – especially in conservation – revealed that children did not understand things that adults assumed they knew.

Piaget: It’s just that no adult ever had the idea of asking children about conservation. It was so obvious that if you change the shape of an object, the quantity will be conserved. Why ask a child? The novelty lay in asking the question.

I first discovered the problem of conservation when I worked with young epileptics from 10 to 15. I wanted to find some empirical way of distinguishing them from normal children. I went around with four coins and four beads, and I would put the coins and beads in one-to-one correspondence and then hide one of the coins. It the three remaining coins were then stretched out into a longer line, the epileptic children said they had more coins than beads. No conservation at all. I thought I had discovered a method to distinguish normal from abnormal children. Then I went on to work with normal children and discovered that all children lack conservation.

Hall: Isn’t it fortunate that you checked?

Piaget: A biologist would have to verify; a philosopher would not have checked.

Hall: When you say that the young child is egocentric, just what do you mean?

Piaget: That term has had the worst interpretations of any word I have used.

Hall: That’s why I asked thequestion.

Piaget: When I refer to the child, I use the term egocentric in an epistemological sense, not in an affective or a moral one. This is why it has been misinterpreted. The egocentric child – and all children are egocentric – considers his own point of view as the only possible one. He is incapable of putting himself in someone else’s place, because he is unaware that the other person has a point of view.

Hall: Would this be analogous to man’s original belief that the universe resolved around the earth?

Piaget: That is precisely the example I was going to give. It is a natural tendency of the intelligence and it becomes corrected vey slowly as the child matures. Many children, you know, believe that the sun and the moon follow them as they walk. A more prosaic example is the way a young child makes up a new word and assumes that everyone knows exactly what he means by it.

Hall: Then morality doesn’t enter the picture until the child is aware or other viewpoints and disregards them. At one time you did extensive work on the way children develop a sense of right and wrong.

Piaget: That was 40 years ago and I haven’t gone back to it. But we can talk about it if you like.

Hall: I believe you said that the child’s sense of moral judgment is largely independent of adult influence.

Piaget: You must distinguish between two periods in the development of moral judgment. In the first period, a child accepts his rules from authority and the ideas of adults are important to him. In the second period, he is independent of adults. Solidarity grows between children and a morality develops, based on cooperation.

Hall: As more mothers work, children are placed in nursery schools at earlier ages, and communal methods of life, like those in the kibbutz, are becoming more common. Suppose adults did not impose standards of right and wrong upon children who were reared in a Kibbutz. Would the children develop this sense of moral justice and cooperation anyway?

Piaget: It would happen even earlier. And if the adults are ready to discussmatters seriously with the children they will form a system of cooperation with the adults.

Hall: Would the morality that developed under this cooperative system be likely the lessen the conflict between generations?

Piaget: I would think so. Children often must discover the idea of justice at the expense of their parents. From about the age of seven or eight, justice prevails over obedience. But this theory should be studied experimentally.

Hall: You would have to go out into the field and test it.

Piaget: I have other pies in the oven.

Hall: I’m interested in the implications for education of the pies you’ve already baked. In the United States we have a concept called reading readiness. Some educators say that a child cannot learn to read until he has reached a mental age of six years and six months.

Piaget: The idea of reading readiness corresponds to the idea of competence in embryology. If a specific chemical inductor hits the development embryo, it will produce na effect if the competence is there, and if it is not, the effect will not occur. So the concept of readiness is not bad but I am not sure that it can be applied to reading. Reading aptitude may not be related to mental age. There could easily be a difference of aptitude between children independent of mental age. But I cannot state that as a fact because I have not studied it closely.

Hall: In recent years the new mathematics has come into American schools. Along with a new vocabulary we introduced new concepts like set theory.

Piaget: Seven years would be perfectly all right for most operations of set theory because children have their own spontaneous operations that are very akin to those concepts. But when you teach set theory you should use the child’s actual vocabulary along with activity – make the child do natural things. The important thing is not to teach modern mathematics with ancient methods.

As for teaching children concepts that they have not attained in their spontaneous development, it is completely useless. A British mathematician attempted to teach his five-year-old daughter the rudiments of set theory and conservation. He did the typical experiments of conservation with numbers. Then he gave the child two collections and the five-year-old immediately said those are two sets. But she couldn’t count and she had no idea of conservation.

Hall: But she had the vocabulary.

Piaget: That’s the point. You cannot teach concepts verbally; you must use a method founded on activity.

Hall: If you had the power in your hands, would you make any changes in the school curriculum?

Piaget: We spend so much time teaching things that don’t have to be taught. Spelling is a good example. One learns to spell much better just by reading; teaching spelling is a waste of time. And history, we should reduce the amount of time we spend making people disgusted with history. We should concentrate on giving them a taste for reading history – which is not the same thing at all.

There is one addition I would like to make to the curriculum. So far as I know the experimental method is not taught in any school and it is a way of checking your hypotheses. If we can teach this method to children they will learn that it is possible to check their thoughts.

Hall: How would you go about teaching this?

Piaget: In the experimental method you have the problem of what causes a given effect. A certain number of factors intervence and – in order to discover the cause – you must keep all factors constant except one.

Hall: As when you gave the children five flasks of colorless liquid and asked them to produce yellow.

Piaget: That’s right. One of the flasks contained only water, another flask contained bleach, and the other three liquids that when mixed together turned yellow. We showed the child the color but not how to make it. The child also had to determine just what sort of liquid was in the flasks that held bleach and water. Not until a child reaches the age of 12 does he test all possible combinations of fluids and solve the problem.

Hall: What if the teacher were to demonstrate this experiment to the class?

Piaget: It would be completely useless. The child must discover the method for himself through his own activity.

Hall: That sound very much like John Dewey’s concept of learning by doing.

Piaget: Indeed it does; John Dewey was a great man.

Hall: Now that we’ve mentioned na American educator, may I ask what you have called "the American question"? Is it possible to speed up the learning of conservation concepts?

Piaget: In turn may I ask the counter-question? Is ita good thing to accelerate the learning of these concepts? Acceleration is certainly possible but first we must find out whether it is desirable or harmful. Take the concept of object permanency – the realization that a ball, a rattle or a person continues to exist when it no longer can be seen. A kitten develops this concept at four months, but the kitten stops right there while the baby goes on to learn more advanced concepts. Perhaps a certain slowness is useful in developing the capacity to assimilate new concepts.

We also know that the ease of learning varies with the developmental level of the child. In the same number of learning sessions children who have reached na advanced stage make marked progress over younger children. It apperars that there is na optimum speed of development. It you write a book too slowly it won’t be a good book; if you write it too fast it won’t be a good book either. No one has made studies to determine the optimum speed.

Hall: But wouldn’t the optimum speed vary with the person? Some people naturally write faster than others – and write just as well.

Piaget: That’s highly possible. We know theaverage speed of the children we have studied in our Swiss culture but there is nothing that says that the average speed is the optimum. But blindly to accelerate the learning of conservation concepts coult be even worse than doing nothing.

Hall: I think we ask the American question because the ever-increasing length of education troubles us. Many of us would like to find some way to shorten those years that go into professional preparation.

Piaget: It is difficult to decide just how to shorten studies. If you spend one year studying something verbally that requires two years of active study, then you have actually lost a year. If we were willing to lose a bit more time and let the children be active, let them use trial and error on different things, then the time we seem to have lost we may have actually gained. Children may develop a general method that they can use on other subjects.

Hall: And we come back to learning by doing. Some of your experiments with the child’s concept of space indicate that children come to a Euclidean world view very slowly. Does this same conception of space evolve in all peoples, or is it a feature of Western culture?

Piaget: I wouldn’t say that Euclidean geometry is cultural. You know, historically scientific geometry began with Euclidean metric geometry. Projective geometry followed and only later did we develop topology. But so far as theory goes, both projective and metric geometry can be derived from topology. Now if you examine the way a child develops his idea of space, you will see that he first develops topological intuitions, so that the child’s ideas are closer to mathematical theory than to history. To get back to your question, any group – if they develop that far – would certainly acquire a Euclidean geometry, because once you have the topological intuitions and actual measurement, it is the simplest geometry.

Hall: Then you do not believe that our language determines the way we see the world?

Piaget: There is a very close realtionship between language and thought, but language does not govern thoughts or form operations. It is language that is influenced by operations and not our operations that are influenced by language.

Dr. H. Sinclair has made some interesting experiments along this line. She had two groups of children; one group had conservation, the other group did not. She took the group of children that did not understand conservation and taught them the language used by the children who understood the concept. They learned to use "long" and "short" and "wide" and "narrow" in a consistent way. She wanted to see if the concepts would come once the language was learned. They did not. If a ball of clay was pulled into a sausage, the children could describe it as "long"and "thin". But they did not understand that the clay was longer but thinner than the ball and therefore the same quantity.

Hall: What if the language does not express a concept?

Piaget: The thing that changes with different languages is the way we partition reality – the way we break the world into composing parts. But this translation of concepts into their parts is not essential to thought.

Hall: Jerome Bruner has studied child development extensively and he is one of your respectful critics. Could you explain to me the difference between your theoretical approach and that of Bruner’s?

Piaget: It is very difficult to explain thedifference between Bruner and me. Bruner is a mobile and active man and has held a sequence of different points of view. Essentially Bruner does not believe in mental operations while I do. Bruner replaces operations with factors that have varied through his different stages – Bruner’s stages, not the child’s. Bruner uses things like language, like image. When Bruner was at the stage of strategies he used to say that his strategies were more or less Piaget’s operations. At that time our theories were closest. Since then he has changed his point of view.

Hall: Might we say that one day Bruner may reach he operational stage?

Piaget: The answer to your question isthat Bruner is an unpredictable man – this is what makes his charm.

Hall: Can we learn about man only by studying man? Or can we go into the laboratory and study rats and primates?

Piaget: Comparative studies are necessary but one must not make the mistake of believing that a rat is sufficient. Many theories of some schools that I will not name are based on the rat. It is not enough for me.

Hall: But I can mention a school of psychology. Could you describe your differences with behaviorism?

Piaget: That’s too broad a term. Let’s talk instead about behaviorist empiricism; I think that’s what you’re really asking about. Empiricism implies that reality can be reduced to observable features and that knowledge must limit itself to those features. Biologists have shown that the organism constantly interacts with its environment; the view that it submits passively to the environment has become untenable. How then can man be simply a recorder of outside events? When he transforms his environment by acting upon it he gains a deeper knowledge of the world than any copy of reality ever could provide. What is more empiricism cannot explain the existence of mathematics which deals with unobservable features and with cognitive constructions. In Biology the exact counterpart of behaviorist empiricism is the Lamarckian theory of variation and evolution – a long-abandoned doctrine. When we look at the famous stimulus-response schema we find that behaviorist psychologists have retained a strictly Lamarckian outlook. The contemporary biological revolution has passed them by. If we are to get a tenable stimulus-response theory we must completely modify its classical meaning. Before a stimulus can set off a response the organism must be capable of providing it. We talked earlier about the idea of competence in embryology. If this concept applies in learning – and my research indicates that it does – then learning will be different at different developmental levels. It would depend upon the evolution of competences. The classical concept of learning suddenly becomes inadequate.

Hall: Does this mean that individual development is all innate?

Piaget: Not at all. Each man is the product of interation between heredity and environment. It is virtually impossible to draw a clear line between innate and acquired behavior patterns.

Hall: Are there any pitfalls to trap the unwary psychologist?

Piaget: The danger to psychologists lies in practical applications. Too often psychologists make practical applications before they know what they areapplying. We must always keep a placefor fundamental research and beware of practical applications when we do not know the foundation of our theories.,

Hall: How do you see the future of psychology?

Piaget: With optimism. We see new problems every day.