Piaget’s Impact

Even with the caveat that his stages may reflect, at a more fundamental level,

an underlying continuum, Piaget’s contributions can be seen as a great leap

forward in approximate answers to one of humankind’s oldest riddles: how

human beings know their world. The eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel

Kant described certain core assumptions, such as quantity, quality,

and cause and effect, which he called “categories of the understanding.”

Human beings make these assumptions when they relate specific objects

and events to one another•when they reason. Piaget’s work became known

to a 1960’s-era American psychology that was dominated by B. F. Skinner’s

behavioral view of a passive child whose plastic nature was simply molded by

the rewards and punishments of parents and culture. The impact of Piaget’s

work shifted psychology’s focus back to a Kantian perspective of the child as

an active reasoner who selectively responds to aspects of culture he or she

finds relevant. Piaget himself outlined the sequence, the pace, and some of

the dynamics of the maturing child’s development of major Kantian categories.

Such subsequent contributions as Lawrence Kohlberg’s work on moral

development and Robert Selman’s work on role-taking can be viewed as an

elaboration and extension of Piaget’s unfinished work. Piaget, like Sigmund

Freud, was one of psychology’s pivotal thinkers. Without him, the entire

field of developmental psychology would be radically different.