WORLD OF LEARNING: MY REVIEW OF "CONVERSATIONS WITH JEAN PIAGET"

CONVERSATIONS WITH JEAN PIAGET. By Jean-Claude Bringuier, translated by Basia Miller Gulati. University of Chicago, 1980. 145 pages.

Piagetian ideas have had such an impact on education and child psychology that as with all schools of thought that become popularized, those ideas have been vilified or bowdlerized to fit preconceptions. There are Piagetians and anti-Piagetians who have never read Piaget.

There is a good reason. At the risk of overgeneralizing, it seems to me that genius is rarely warm and fuzzy. Piaget can be prickly, and his writing, rooted in rigorous scientific research and expressed in the language of the academy, is always dense and often inaccessible, at least to a reader like me.

That made this slender volume especially helpful. In the process of talking to Piaget and some of his colleagues in 1969 and 1975, Jean-Claude Bringuier skillfully teases out complex ideas in palatable form.

He also gives us a picture of a real person in a real (and messy) study who likes to make fondue and go on bike rides, listens to Bach and Wagner while he works, and wears his Legion of Honor pin because it helps with French customs officials and restaurant reservations.

For anyone wanting a basic understanding of Piaget, you could do worse than to read 'Conversations' and another short book written by Piaget himself with his collaborator Bärbel Inhelder, 'The Psychology of the Child.'

In 'Conversations,' Piaget is bemused by critics who find his theories rigid and restrictive. His deep and profound respect for children and childhood motivated him, like a child, to continually assimilate and accommodate in the process of constructing knowledge.

'That's the ideal I personally strive for,' he remarks to Bringuier, 'to remain a child to the end. Childhood is the creative phase par excellence!'

That makes it difficult to unequivocally state what his theories are, because Piaget was always growing and changing.

Piaget admits that he wasn't interested 'in individuals' but 'in what is is general in the development of intelligence and knowledge.' His denigrators might be surprised to learn that although Piaget did find evidence for fixed stages of developmental transition, he also came to the conclusion that 'the prime mover of evolution is behavior.'

Indeed, while Piaget wants to stay away from recommending best practices for teaching, Bringuier gets him to acknowledge there are methodologies that are might be more effective.

When Piaget claims that 'the role of the psychologist is, above all, to give the facts that the pedagogue can use and not put oneself in his place and give him advice,' Bringuier presses the issue, noting that theory can influence pedagogy.

Piaget answers by complaining that frequently 'absolutely nothing is done to teach the child the spirit of experimentation. He has lessons, he sees experiments demonstrated; but seeing them is not the same as doing them for himself. I'm convinced that one could develop a marvelous method of participatory education by giving the child the apparatus with which to do experiments and thus discover a lot of things for himself. Guided, of course.'

That sounds awfully close to Vygotsky's ideas, and the zone of proximal development, to me.

'Education,' Piaget goes on to say, 'for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society....But for me, education means making creators....You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.'

Inspiring words from the man who also tells his interviewer,'Everything one teaches a child prevents him from inventing or discovering.'