Why Do We Care?

As we've already stated, we're a group of future educators, not psychologists, so why do we study Piaget and his theories so closely? Well, in this case, "we" represent a group of students studying to be professional educators. We can hardly do so without knowing where our profession has been, and where we're heading. Piaget's work has had not only a significant impact on how Americans have approached teaching. According to Wikipedia's entry on this topic, During the 1970s and 1980s, Piaget’s works also inspired the transformation of European and American education, including both theory and practice, leading to a more ‘child-centred’ approach. In conversations with Jean Piaget, he says: "Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators—not conformists," (Bringuier, 1980, p.132). I would dare say that the personal philosophy of education that Piaget expresses above mirrors, or at least echoes, what most of us hope to inpsire in our future students.