Jean Piaget Quotes

All children are born pure egoists. They perceive their needs to the exclusion of all others. Only through socialization do they learn that some forms of gratification must be deferred and others denied.

Anyone who is interested in the psychology of children will have observed that whereas one child will resist temptation or seduction, another will easily yield to it. There are children who will hardly oppose any resistance to the invitation of an unknown person to follow him; others who react in an opposite way in the same circumstances.

The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe.

Since I was 9, I'd been told what to say, what to think.

The child of three or four is saturated with adult rules. His universe is dominated by the idea that things are as they ought to be, that everyone's actions conform to laws that are both physical and moral - in a word, that there is a Universal Order.

I've never been able to accept any kind of discipline.

We've got to understand that the ages of zero to three are the most formative years of a person's life, the time they learn the concept of reward and punishment and develop a conscience, and that 50 percent of all learned human response is learned in the first year of life.

The arguments about parents being too permissive and kids growing up without superegos are not based on fact. Our research tells us that the family is not the only purveyor of morality.

I couldn't follow nobody's rules.

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.

I was raised to please people in authority, and I'd also come from a sheltered boarding school, so I was very naive and young for my years.

You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as to praise him for playing by the rules.

Neither in writing nor in reading wilt thou be able to lay down rules for others before thou shalt have first learned to obey rules thyself.

It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."

The conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the operations of its own reason.

Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we...yes, I assure you...we should be begging to be under control again at once.

I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance,--habit, which makes everything easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course.

The authority of example and considerations of character, unlike pudding, are not whipped up in an instant.

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

The child is a realist in every domain of thought, and it is therefore natural that in the moral sphere he should lay more stress on the external, tangible element than on the hidden motive.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Every child must master empathy-based ethics because the rules are changing; the less they apply the less learning them has positive impact

To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.

It's easier to be a grownup than to be a kid. When you're a kid, you lie constantly and people are always calling you on it. And when you're a grownup, you lie constantly and people rarely do. Children are constantly being caught. Adults rarely so. Being an adult, you also get a free pass, which means you have to actively be a good person because nobody's around to tell you to do that. Even evil kids will be good when adults are watching. But once you're an adult, no one is. As a grownup, you've got an agency over your own life, which hopefully you use for the greater good and not evil.

Lying is a crime the least liable to variation in its definitions. A child will upon the slightest temptation tell an untruth as readily as the truth. That is, as soon as he can suspect that it will be to his advantage; and the dread that he afterward has of telling a lie is acquired principally by his being threatened, punished, and terrified by those who detect him in it, till at length, a number of painful impressions are annexed to the telling of an untruth, and he comes even to shudder at the thought of it.