Jean Piaget Quotes

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

Whenever the child is given the notion that he needs to be entertained, learning comes almost to a halt.

Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

If children know there is someone standing over them who knows all the answers, they are less inclined to find the answers for themselves.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

All learning is in the learner, not in the teacher.

Children are like men, the experience of others does not help them.

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.

My father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child

School doesn't teach you much. School teaches you how to follow directions, that's what school is for.

If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!

A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another's learning

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.

Well, part of it is a longstanding belief - it's been in our education establishment at least since the 1930s - that somehow children should be allowed to discover knowledge for themselves, that they should construct their own knowledge. This has surfaced most recently in connection with mathematics instruction, where the idea is that they need to discover how to add for themselves. Rather than being taught how to add, they should construct this knowledge on their own.

Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature.

Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is clearly formulated in the child's mind, as to teach the name of an object.

Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.

Young children learn in a different manner from that of older children and adults, yet we can teach them many things if we adapt our materials and mode of instruction to their level of ability. But we miseducate young children when we assume that their learning abilities are comparable to those of older children and that they can be taught with materials and with the same instructional procedures appropriate to school-age children.