Piaget vividly remembered a kidnapping attempt that never happened
For years Jean Piaget carried a clear memory of his nanny fighting off a kidnapper beside his pram. When he was 15 she confessed she had invented the whole thing. The false memory fascinated him, and he went on to show that children do not think like small adults but in their own distinct ways.
Piaget was born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, in French-speaking Switzerland, the eldest son of a professor of medieval literature. A precocious naturalist, he had published several articles on molluscs by 15 and was already known to zoologists. His godfather nudged him towards philosophy and logic, and he studied at Neuchâtel and briefly at Zurich, where he also developed an interest in psychoanalysis.
The turning point came in Paris, at a boys' school run by Alfred Binet, creator of the Binet-Simon intelligence test. Marking those tests, Piaget noticed that young children did not just get answers wrong; they made the same kinds of mistakes, errors older children and adults avoided. He concluded that young minds work in fundamentally different ways, and eventually proposed that development passes through stages, each with characteristic patterns of thought.
Back in Geneva from 1921 at the Rousseau Institute, he married Valentine Châtenay in 1923 and studied their three children from infancy. From 1929 until 1968 he led the International Bureau of Education, declaring in 1934 that only education could save societies from collapse, whether violent or gradual. In 1955 he founded the International Center for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva, so productive that scholars nicknamed it Piaget's factory.
Ernst von Glasersfeld called him the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing, the view that people build understanding rather than passively absorb it. His ideas spread widely in the 1960s and helped make developmental psychology a major field. By the end of the century, only B. F. Skinner was cited more often among psychologists. Constructivist methods remain common in early childhood education. He died in 1980.
Source: Jean Piaget
