IT is late afternoon, but the four-year-old insists: "It can't be. I haven't had my nap." Such is the mind of the child, by most indications illogical and full of nonsense. Not so, says Jean Piaget, a grumpy, mountain-climbing Swiss philosopher who is also one of the world's foremost child psychologists. Few researchers have so meticulously or provocatively mapped that terra incognita, the mental world of children. For 50 years, Piaget, now 73, has been discovering through deceptively simple experiments that children actually have surprisingly intricate thinking skills that adults should learn to appreciate and understand better than they do.
Piaget was little heeded in the U.S. during the 1940s and early '50s. Not all of his 30 abstruse books and myriad articles had yet been translated from their original French and, says one child psychologist, "we ignored him because we were so busy with Freud." Piaget's current acceptance is a clear sign of how the preoccupation with orthodox Freudian concerns is broadening to other areas (TIME, March 7). A flood of Piaget translations and explications has appeared.* Piaget-oriented researchers are expanding and following up his leads, and his insights are in growing vogue among U.S. educators, psychologists and some parents. The most enthusiastic compare his work in significance to Freud's pioneering exploration of the emotions. What many people find so appealing about Piaget, as Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles points out, is that in contrast to psychoanalytically oriented researchers, he emphasizes "man the developing thinker rather than man the universal neurotic."
Dreams That Fly. As Freud found that slips of the tongue are keys to the unconscious, Piaget finds that the mental "mistakes" children make are clues to intellectual processes that are really precursors of grown-up thinking. An infant, for example, initially may suck at almost anything that comes near his mouth; soon, when he is hungry, he learns to persevere only when his lips close over a nipple. The reflex-driven gropings by which he learns to recognize the nipple and distinguish it from a rattle, as Piaget sees it, are a first use of trial-and-error logic. Piaget considers this learning process of infancy one phase in the first of four distinct but sometimes overlapping stages. The other stages: ages two to seven, seven to eleven, and eleven to 15.
During the second stage, the child thinks about everything in terms of his own activities; he believes that the moon follows him around, or that dreams fly in through his window when he goes to bed. Erroneous though these ideas are, they help the child comprehend that actions have causes. In this period, the child is not egocentric by choice. Parents should understand, says the University of Rochester's David Elkind, a leading Piaget scholar, that intellectual immaturity and not moral perversity is the reason why a preschooler continues to pester his mother even after she plainly tells him she has a headache.