Repetition—speech not directed to people, saying words for the simple pleasure of it.“Child logic is a subject of infinite complexity, bristling with problems at every point—problems of functional and structural psychology, problems of logic and even of epistemology. It is no easy matter to hold fast to the thread of consistency throughout this labyrinth, and to achieve a systematic exclusion of all problems not connected with psychology.”
“The child… seems to talk far more than the adult. Almost everything he does is to the tune of remarks such as ‘I’m drawing a hat,’ ‘I’m doing it better than you,’ etc. Child thought, therefore, seems more social, less capable of sustained and solitary research. This is true only in appearance. The child has less verbal continence simply because he does not know what it is to keep a thing to himself. Although he talks almost incessantly to his neighbours, he rarely places himself at their point of view.”
In a nutshell
Children are not simply little adults, thinking less efficiently—they think differently.
In a similar vein
Edward de Bono Lateral Thinking (p 38)
Alfred Kinsey Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (p 174)
Stephen Pinker The Blank Slate (p 228)
In the same way that Alfred Kinsey spent years collecting specimens of and writing about the gall wasp before he launched himself on the study of human sexuality, Jean Piaget was a master of natural-world observation before he turned his mind to human matters. As a child and teenager he wandered the hills, streams, and mountains of western Switzerland collecting snails, and later wrote his doctoral thesis on the mollusks of the Valais mountains.
What he learnt in these years—to observe first and classify later—set him up well for examining the subject of child thought, which had attracted plenty of theories but not a great deal of solid scientific observation of actual children. Entering the field, Piaget’s main wish was that his conclusions be drawn from the facts, however difficult or paradoxical they seemed. Added to his methodical skills was—for a scientist—an unusually good grasp of philosophy. Child psychology was a tangle of epistemological questions, yet he decided to focus on very down-to-earth issues such as: “Why does a child talk, and who is she talking to?” and “Why does she ask so many questions?”
If there were answers, he knew they could benefit teachers greatly, and it was for educators mainly that he wrote The Language and Thought of the Child. Most explorers of the child mind had focused on the quantitative nature of child psychology—children were thought to be how they are because they have fewer mental abilities than adults and commit more errors. But Piaget believed that it was not a matter of children having less or more of something, they are fundamentally different in the way they think. Communication problems exist between adults and children not because of gaps in information, but due to the quite different ways they have of seeing themselves within their worlds.
In the opening pages, Piaget asked what he admitted was a strange question: “What are the needs which a child tends to satisfy when he talks?” Any sane person would say that the purpose of language is to communicate with others, but if this were the case, he wondered why children talk when there is no one around, and why even adults talk to themselves, whether internally or muttering aloud. It was clear that language could not be reduced to the one function of simply communicating thought.
Piaget conducted his research at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva, opened in 1912 for the study of the child and teacher training. There he observed children of four and six, taking down everything they said while they worked and played, and the book includes transcripts of their “conversations.”
What Piaget quickly discovered—and what every parent can confirm—is that when children speak, a lot of the time they are not talking to anyone in particular. They are thinking aloud. He identified two types of speech, egocentric and socialized. Within the egocentric type were three patterns:
Repetition—speech not directed to people, saying words for the simple pleasure of it.
Monologue—whole commentaries that follow the child’s actions or play.
Collective monologue—when children are talking apparently together, yet are not really taking account of what the others are saying. (A room of 10 children seated at different tables may be noisy with talk, but in fact are all really talking to themselves.)
He noted that until a certain age (seven, he thought), children have no “verbal continence,” but must say anything that comes into their head. A kindergarten or nursery, he wrote, “is a society in which, strictly speaking, individual and social life are not differentiated.” Because children believe themselves to be the center of the universe, there is no need for the idea of privacy or withholding views out of sensitivity to others. Adults, in contrast, because of their comparative lack of egocentricity, have adapted to a fully socialized speech pattern in which many things are left unsaid. Only madmen and children, as it were, say whatever they think, because only they really matter. It is for this reason that children are able to talk all the time in the presence of their friends, but are never able to see things from the friends’ point of view.
Part of the reason for the egocentricity of children is that a significant part of their language involves gestures, movements, and sounds. As these are not words, they cannot express everything, so children must remain partly a prisoner of their own mind. We can understand this when we appreciate that the greater an adult’s mastery of language, the more likely they are to be able to understand, or at least be aware of, the views of others. Language, in fact, takes people beyond themselves, which is why human culture puts such stress on teaching it to children—it enables them to eventually move out of egocentric thinking.
Piaget borrowed a distinction from psychoanalysis between two types of thought:
Directed or intelligent thought, which has an aim, adapts that aim to reality, and can communicate it in language. This thinking is based on experience and logic.
Undirected or autistic thought, which involves aims that are not conscious and not adapted to reality, based on satisfaction of desires rather than establishing truth. The language of this sort of thinking is images, myths, and symbols.
For the directed mind, water has certain properties and obeys certain laws. It is conceived of conceptually as well as materially. To the autistic mind, water is only relevant in relation to desires or needs—it is something that can be drunk or seen or enjoyed.
This distinction helped Piaget appreciate the development of children’s thought up to the age of 11. From 3–7 children are largely egocentric and have elements of autistic thought, but from 7 to 11 egocentric logic makes way for perceptual intelligence.
Piaget set up experiments in which children were asked to relate a story they had been told or to explain something, such as the workings of a tap, that had been shown to them. Before they were 7, the children did not really care if the people they were talking to understood the story or the mechanism. They could describe, but not analyze. But from 7–8 onwards, the children did not assume that the other person would know what they meant and attempted to give a faithful account—to be objective. Until that age, their egocentrism does not allow them to be objective. What they can’t explain or don’t know they make up. But after the age of 7–8 children know what it means to give a correct rendering of the truth; that is, the difference between invention and reality.
Piaget noticed that children think in terms of “schemas,” which allow them to focus on the whole of a message without having to make sense of every detail. When they hear something they don’t understand, children don’t try to analyze the sentence structure or words, but attempt to grasp or create an overall meaning. He noted that the trend in mental development is always from the syncretic to the analytical—to see the whole first, before gaining the ability to break things down into parts or categorize. Prior to age 7 or 8, the child’s mind is largely syncretic, but it later develops powers of analysis that mark the shift from the juvenile to the adult mind.
Piaget wondered why children, particularly those under 7, fantasize and dream and use their imagination so much. He observed that because they do not engage in deductive or analytical thought, there is no reason to make a firm demarcation between “the real” and “the not real.” As their minds do not work in terms of causality and evidence, everything seems possible.
When a child asks “What would happen if I were an angel?” to an adult the question is not worth pursuing because we know it can’t be real. But for a child anything is not only possible, it is explainable, since no objective logic is required. To satisfy their mind, all that is required is motivation—for example, the ball wanted to roll down the hill, so it did. At age 6, a boy might feel that a river flows down a hill because it wants to. A year later, he will explain it in terms of “water always flows downhill, so that is why the river is flowing down this hill here.”
Why do many young children incessantly ask “Why?” Because they want to know the intention of everyone and everything, even if it is inanimate, not realizing that only some things have intentions. Later, when children can appreciate that most things are caused rather than intended, their questions become about causality. The time before they understand cause and effect—precausality—coincides with the time of egocentrism.
The “world of make believe,” as we tag it in our superior way, has the feel of cold, hard reality to younger children, because within it everything makes sense according to their own intentions and motivations. In fact, as Piaget wryly observed, a child’s world seems to work so well that, according to their understanding, logic is not required to support it.
Adults often find it difficult to understand children because they have forgotten that logic plays no role in a child’s mind. We cannot make children think in the same way as us before they reach a certain age. At each age, children gain a particular equilibrium in relation to their environment. That is, the way they think and perceive at age 5 perfectly explains their world. But that same way does not work when they are 8.
In later writings, Piaget explored the final stage of mental development, beginning at age 11 or 12. Teenagers’ abilities to reason, think abstractly, make judgments, and consider future possibilities make them essentially the same as adults. From this point on it is a matter of increases in ability rather than qualitative changes.
Despite some questions about the precise timings, 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 learnt 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—adults also have to accommodate and assimilate new information by making it conform 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. He saw the mind as a relatively arbitrary creation, formed in such a way that reality can be explained according to that person’s own model of the world. Education has to take account of these models rather than simply shoving facts down people’s throats, otherwise information will not be assimilated. Such a method of education results in dull conformists who are uncomfortable with change, and Piaget was ahead of his time in suggesting that we should educate people to be innovative and inventive thinkers who are aware of the subjectivity of their own minds, yet mature enough to accommodate new facts. His initial experiments observing the language and thought of the child, therefore, led to great insights into how adults process knowledge and create new understanding.
Born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, western Switzerland, Piaget was the son of a professor of medieval literature at the local university. His strong interest in biology resulted in the publication of several scientific articles before he had even left school, and in 1917 he published a philosophical novel, Recherché.
After gaining his PhD, Piaget began studying child linguistic development, and in 1921 he became director of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Geneva. From 1925–29 he was professor of psychology, sociology, and the philosophy of science at the University of Neuchâtel, after which he returned to the University of Geneva to be its professor of scientific thought for the next decade. He simultaneously held posts with the Swiss education authorities. In 1952 Piaget became professor of genetic psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, and until his death in 1980 directed the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva.
Key books include The Child’s Conception of the World (1928), The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1953), Biology and Knowledge (1971), and The Grasp of Consciousness (1977).