Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget (August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980) was a Swiss development psychologist, famous for working out a sequence of stages of cognitive development, and notable for his idea that children (and indeed adults) are continually generating theories about the external world (which are kept or dismissed depending on whether we see them working or not in practice).

Biography: early life

He was born in Neuchâtel in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. His father, Arthur, was a professor of medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. He was a precocious child and developed an interest in biology, particularly of mollusks, to the point of publishing a number of papers before he graduated from high school. His long scientific career began in 1907 at the age of ten with the publication of a short paper on the albino sparrow. Over the next seven decades he wrote more than sixty books and several hundred articles.

Related Topics:
Switzerland - Medieval literature - Biology - Mollusk

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He received a Ph.D. in natural science from the University of Neuchâtel and studied briefly at the University of Zürich. During this time, he published two philosophical papers which showed the direction of his thinking at the time, but which he later dismissed as adolescent work. His interest in psychoanalysis can also be dated to this period.

Related Topics:
Ph.D - University of Zürich

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He then moved from Switzerland to France, where he taught at the school for boys run by Alfred Binet, the developer of the Binet intelligence test, in Grange-aux-Belles. In 1921, he returned to Switzerland as director of the Rousseau Institute in Geneva.

Related Topics:
France - Alfred Binet - Intelligence test - Rousseau Institute - Geneva

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In 1923, he married Valentine Châtenay, and they had three children, whom he studied from infancy.

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