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Piaget has observed repeatedly that children explore the complexities of their world with immense zest, and his findings have given encouragement and innumerable specific suggestions to the "discovery method" of teaching. Now used in many schools across the U.S. and in Great Britain, the method draws also on the ideas of John Dewey, Italian Educator Maria Montessori and Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner. Discovery classrooms, in essence, are informal laboratories where children gain an early familiarity with the principles of Euclidean geometry by manipulating variously shaped objects, and learn fundamentals of counting and reproduction by charting the egg production of classroom hens. As Piaget said recently, "a ready-made truth is only half a truth. The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things."
Piaget himself is a lapsed biologist who never outgrew his fascination with the orderly growth of organisms. Born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, he was a child prodigy who published important papers on mollusks before he was out of high school, later became "haunted by the idea of discovering a sort of embryology of intelligence." In 1920 he went to work in the Paris laboratory of Psychologist Théodore Simon, a co-developer with Alfred Binet of the first successful IQ test. Poring over the "wrong" answers that children regularly gave on the tests, Piaget was surprised to see that the responses fell into patterns that differed according to the children's ages.
Appointed director of studies at Geneva's Rousseau Institute, Piaget continued to investigate this phenomenon. He spent long hours observing the crib activity of his own three children, shot marbles on hands and knees with Genevan boys as he tested their ideas and feelings about ethics and the rules of games, and gently asked schoolchildren questions about the numbers and groupings of flowers and beads that he gave them to play with. His investigations led him to detailed observations on how children acquire such complicated concepts and abilities as space, geometry, causality, logic, moral judgment and memory. Le Patron, as he is known to associates, currently presides over a staff of 25 at his Institute of Educational Science and churns out most of his books and articles during long summer retreats at a farmhouse in the Alps.
Compelling Conception. Piaget's critics feel that his conclusions are based more on his canny intuition than on demonstrable scientific evidence. He scorns the use of statistical measurements and controls, which makes it difficult to prove that the children he has studied are typical. Some educators and child-guidance experts, particularly in the U.S., say Piaget's sweeping concepts are of little help in explaining or diagnosing the differing motivations and accomplishments of individual children.