I could not think without writing.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.
Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformations that correspond, more or less adequately, to reality.
Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
To reason logically is so to link one's propositions that each should contain the reason for the one succeeding it, and should itself be demonstrated by the one preceding it. Or at any rate, whatever the order adopted in the construction of one's own exposition, it is to demonstrate judgments by each other.
Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.
From this time on, the universe is built up into an aggregate of permanent objects connected by causal relations that are independent of the subject and are placed in objective space and time.
The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching.
To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
One of the most striking things one finds about the child under 7-8 is his extreme assurance on all subjects.
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
The practice of narrative and argument does not lead to invention, but it compels a certain coherence of thought.
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.
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
