Piaget And His Theory Of Learning

Jean Piaget is one of the names written in golden letters in psychology. His theory of childhood cognitive learning makes us know him today as the father of modern pedagogy. He found that the principles of our logic begin to take hold before language acquisition, generating themselves through sensory and motor activity in interaction with the environment, especially with the sociocultural environment.

Psychic development, which begins with birth and ends in adulthood, is comparable to organic growth: like the latter, it essentially consists of a path to equilibrium. In the same way that the body evolves to a relatively stable level, characterized by the end of growth and maturity of the organs, mental life can also be conceived as evolving towards a form of final equilibrium, represented by the adult person.

Its influence on the psychology of learning stems from the consideration that it takes place through mental development, through language, games and understanding. For this, the educator’s first task is to generate interest as an instrument with which to understand and act with the student. These investigations, carried out for almost forty years, not only try to get to know the child better and improve pedagogical or educational methods, but also include the person.

Piaget’s main idea is that it is essential to understand the formation of the child’s mental mechanisms to capture their nature and functioning in adults. His pedagogical theorizing was based on a psychological, logical and biological approach. Thus, it is embodied in its definition of the action of thinking, where it starts from pillars conditioned by genetics and is built through sociocultural stimuli.

This is how the information that the person receives is configured. This information is always learned in an active way, however unconscious and passive the processing of information may seem.

learn to adapt

According to Piaget’s Theory of Learning, learning is a process that only makes sense in situations of change. Therefore, learning is, in part, knowing how to adapt to these novelties. This theory explains the dynamics of adaptation through the processes of assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation refers to the way an organism faces a stimulus from the environment in terms of its current organization, while accommodation implies a modification of the current organization in response to the demands of the environment. Through assimilation and accommodation, we cognitively restructure our learning throughout development (cognitive restructuring).

Accommodation or adjustment is the process through which the subject modifies his schemes, cognitive structures, in order to incorporate new objects into this structure. This can be achieved by creating a new forget or modifying an existing schema so that the same stimulus and its associated natural behavior can integrate as part of it.

Assimilation and accommodation are two invariable processes of cognitive development. For Piaget, assimilation and accommodation interact with each other in a process of equilibrium. This can be seen as a regulatory process, at a higher level, that drives the relationship between assimilation and accommodation.

John Lennon used to say that life is what happens while we are making other plans, and it often seems that this is true. Human beings need a certain security to live peacefully, and that’s why we create the illusion of permanence, that everything is static and nothing changes, but that’s not how it works. Everything is constantly changing, including ourselves, but we are not aware of it, until the change is so evident that we have no choice but to face it.

We socialize through language

During early childhood we witness a transformation of intelligence. From being simply sensory and motor or practical, it becomes thought itself, under the double influence of language and socialization.

Language, in the first place, by allowing the subject to explain his actions, facilitates the reconstruction of the past, and, therefore, allows to evoke in his absence the objects towards which the previous behaviors were directed. It also allows us to anticipate future actions that have not yet been carried out, and sometimes even replace them with words alone, without ever carrying them out. This is the starting point of thought as a cognitive process and Piaget’s own thought.

Language itself, in effect, unites concepts and notions that belong to everyone and that reinforce individual thinking through a broad system of collective thinking. The child is virtually immersed in this last thought when he manages to master the word.

In this sense, the same thing happens with thinking as with behavior considered globally. Instead of fully adapting to the new realities that he discovers and gradually builds, the subject must begin with a laborious incorporation of data to his self and his activity, and this egocentric assimilation characterizes both the beginnings of the child’s thinking and those of its socialization .

Behavior as an engine of evolution

In 1976 Piaget published a small book entitled “Behavior, the engine of evolution”. In it, he exposes a perspective on the function of behavior as a determining factor of evolutionary change, and not as a mere product of it, which would be the result of mechanisms independent of the action of organisms.

Piaget mainly discusses with neo-Darwinian postures, since he considers that biological evolution does not occur only by natural selection, understood exclusively as the product of random genetic variability and differentiated rates of survival and reproduction due to adaptive advantages verified a posteriori.

From this perspective, it would be a process independent of the organism’s conduct, and would only be explained by the consequences, favorable or unfavorable, of the phenotypic changes caused by absolutely unlucky mutations and their transmission over generations.

Behavior, for Piaget, is a manifestation of the organism’s global dynamics as an open system in constant interaction with the environment. It would also be a factor of evolutionary change, and to try to explain the mechanisms by which behavior would fulfill this function, it resorts to the concept of epigenesis and its own explanatory model of adaptation in terms of assimilation and accommodation. Epigenesis is understood as the reciprocal interaction between genotype and environment for the construction of the phenotype as a function of experience.

Piaget maintains that all conduct has the necessary intervention of internal factors. He also points out that all animal behavior, including human, involves an accommodation to the conditions of fear, as well as its cognitive assimilation, understood as integration to a previous behavioral structure.

Piaget’s Contributions to Current Education

Piaget’s contributions to education are considered to be of utmost importance. Piaget is the founder of genetic psychology, which significantly affected the educational theory and practice that were generated around it, which varied over time, giving rise to different formulations. It is worth mentioning that many works were developed based on Piaget’s contributions.

Jean Piaget’s work consists of his discoveries of human thinking from a biological, psychological and logical perspective. It is necessary to clarify that the concept of “genetic psychology” is not applied in a purely biological or physiological context, as it neither refers nor is based on genes; it is labeled “genetic” because it is developed with respect to genesis, the origin of the principle of human thought.

One of Piaget’s great contributions to current education was his reasoning that in the early years of a child’s education, the objective is to achieve cognitive development, the first learning process. For this, it is essential and complementary to what the family has taught and encouraged in the child, allowing him to learn some rules and norms that can be assimilated in a school environment.

Another contribution by Piaget, which we can see reflected in today’s schools, is that the theory that takes place in a classroom is not enough to say that the subject has been assimilated and learned. In this sense, learning involves more pedagogical methods, such as the application of knowledge, experimentation and demonstration.

The main goal of education is to create people who are able to innovate, not simply repeat what other generations have done. People who are creative, inventive and discoverers. The second goal of education is to form minds that are critical, that can verify, and not accept, whatever is conveyed to them as valid or true.

A tour of Piaget’s theory would allow any teacher to discover how a student’s mind works. The central idea of ​​his theory is that knowledge is not a copy of reality, but the product of an interrelationship between the person and his surroundings. Therefore, it would always be individual, particular and peculiar.