Education, Part 6b
From the cover of “Piaget for Beginners”
Lev Vygotsky on Jean
Piaget
Jean Piaget was born in 1896, three months before Lev
Vygotsky. But Piaget outlived Vygotsky by 46 years. Vygotsky died in 1934,
Piaget in 1980. Piaget spent most of his life in Geneva, Switzerland, and in
nearby Neuchâtel, where he was born.
Piaget was an NGO man. He was Director of a Swiss NGO called
International Bureau of Education (IBE) for 40 years,
from 1929 to 1969 (i.e. from age 35 to age 75), after which the IBE was
incorporated into the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The IBE remained, and still remains, in Geneva.
Piaget received a doctorate in 1918, in Natural History (of
molluscs), although he was later known as a Psychologist. In 1921, at the age
of 25, Piaget was made the director of a small private NGO called the Rousseau Institute, in Geneva. The
Rousseau Institute had been started by Édouard Claparède in 1912 “to turn educational
theory into a science”. Claparède had in turn been the protégé of Théodore Flournoy, a spiritist.
Jean Piaget as a
promising young man
The same Claparède was soon the founder of a much more
ambitious NGO, with “International” in its title, helped by a grant of $5000
from the US Rockefeller Foundation, in 1925. This was the IBE. From 1915 Claparède
was Professor of Psychology at the University of Geneva in succession to
Flournoy, and he held this position until his death in 1940. In 1929, Claparède
promoted Piaget from the Rousseau Institute to the “International” NGO. In the
same year of 1929, Piaget joined Claparède’s University of Geneva as Professor
of Child Psychology.
The most prominent supporter of the IBE at its founding was Albert Thomas, who had become the
Director-General of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) at its founding,
in Geneva, in 1919, remaining in that position until his death in 1932. The
ILO, though ostensibly concerned with labour, was and still is constructed as a
“class neutral” or possibly “class balanced” organisation, with employers in it
as well as workers.
Dr Jean Piaget,
Director
UNESCO’s brief historical note on the IBE
states:
“Since 1934, the IBE has organized the
International Conference on Public Education (now the International Conference
on Education) which, from 1946 onwards, was convened together with the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), founded in
1945.
“In 1969, the IBE became an integral part of
UNESCO while retaining intellectual and functional autonomy.
“In 1999 the IBE became the UNESCO institute
responsible for educational contents, methods and teaching/learning strategies
through curriculum development.”
At the moment in 1929 when Jean Piaget was made Director of
the IBE, Thomas was still Director-General of the ILO, and Claparède was Professor
of Psychology at the University of Geneva. By 1934, the promoters of the IBE
had leveraged its initial origin as the private NGO project of Professor Claparède,
into a de facto world authority, with
state-level participation, led by an intellectual (Piaget) who had no equal,
and hardly any critics apart from Vygotsky, from then until his death in 1980
and even up to now, 33 years later.
The Assistant Director of the IBE for the 40-year term of
Piaget as Director, was Pedro Rosselló. Between 1934 and 1968 the IBE issued 65
“recommendations”. According to Pedro Rosselló’s historical note (downloadable here),
“It is difficult to form an opinion on the
weight which these 65 recommendations may have had, their implementation having
been left entirely to the governments’ discretion.”
This statement is intended to deceive, but instead, it
reveals. This was a small lobby group with unrivalled access to international
networks, and no opposition. Far from having vague misgivings about the
effectiveness of its propaganda, it worked with relentless determination to
create a hegemony for itself, for the pseudo-science that it pushed, and for
the class that it represented. Without doubt, it succeeded. This was an NGO success
story that modern NGOs (like, in South Africa, Equal
Education and Section 27) can only envy. Doors were opened
for them, and they swept through.
Jean Piaget, Master
of the Universe, 1937
Piaget’s life’s work was to create an ad hoc, utilitarian framework upon which could be overlaid a set of
arbitrary assertions, leading towards a non-political (i.e. bourgeois) system
of syllabus and curriculum design that would be applied all over the globe. As
the Director of the IBE, posing as an international authority, he promoted his
gospel relentlessly. Piaget’s influence did not arrive by the luminosity of his
science, which was practically non-existent, or by the intellectual recognition
of his critical peers, who, with the exception of Vygotsky, remained dumb. Piaget’s
influence came by means of bureaucratic manoeuvres and institutional
pre-emptions. Piaget worked himself into the position of being the “default”
theorist, as he remains, to a large extent, today.
The critique of Piaget is this: His volumes of literature on
education were produced ex novo and
without much reference to other branches of scientific human culture. In this
respect Piaget was little different from his fellow-psychologists of the
period. In the matter in which we are interested for the purposes of this
course, and to which we will return, which is the periodisation of childhood
development, Piaget’s work hardly rises to the level of the empirical (his attempt
at empiricism rests on samples which are too small, and too local) and not at
all to the philosophical, or scientific.
For the “other side” to the above-described critical view,
i.e. for a more appreciative take on Jean Piaget, please see the Cambridge
Companion to Piaget (432 pages, 3MB PDF) downloadable from here or here.
Vygotsky on Piaget
Lev Vygotsky, in the attached document, begins politely, but
by his third paragraph he is beginning to thoroughly demolish Piaget. There is little or no science in Piaget,
according to Vygotsky. Following on from Freud and others, Piaget treated
psychology as if he had a blank sheet upon which to write anything he liked.
This was not science. Says Vygotsky:
“Piaget tries to escape [from “fatal duality”
between theory and data] by sticking to facts. He deliberately avoids generalizing
even in his own field and is especially careful not to step over into the
related realms of logic, of the theory of cognition, or of the history of
philosophy. Pure empiricism seems to him the only safe ground.
“The new facts and the new method led to
many problems... Problems gave birth to theories, in spite of Piaget’s
determination to avoid them by closely following the experimental facts and
disregarding for the time being that the choice itself of experiments is
determined by hypotheses. But facts are always examined in the light of some
theory and therefore cannot be disentangled from philosophy. This is especially
true of facts relative to thinking. To find the key to Piaget’s rich store of
data we must first explore the philosophy behind his search for facts – and
behind their interpretation, which he presents only at the end of his second
book [Judgment and Reason in the Child] in a resumé of its contents.”
Piaget furtively conceals his theoretical framework, says
Vygotsky, until his summary. Vygotsky says that Piaget makes an arbitrary
choice so as to base his psychology on the “pleasure principle”, associated
with the equally arbitrary, ad hoc, and
non-scientific psychologist, Sigmund Freud.
Communists say that from its earliest moment, the child’s
consciousness is social, and that it continues to develop in a social way.
Piaget makes an arbitrary presumption that this is not so. Vygotsky notes that
in Piaget’s work (“autism” here means self-centredness):
“...autism is seen as the original, earliest
form of thought; logic appears relatively late; and egocentric thought is the
genetic link between them.
“This conception, though never presented by
Piaget in a coherent, systematic fashion, is the cornerstone of his whole
theoretical edifice.”
Piaget smuggles in the presumption
that the child as fundamentally self-centred, and not social, and then he makes
this assumption the foundation of all his work. Vygotsky quotes one of Piaget’s
arbitrary pronouncements, thus:
“The social instinct in well-defined form
develops late. The first critical period in this respect occurs toward the age
of 7 or 8 [Judgment and Reason in the Child, p. 276]”
In Vygotsky’s part II, where Piaget’s experiments are
compared to his own, Vygotsky writes:
The development of thought is, to Piaget, a
story of the gradual socialization of deeply intimate, personal, autistic
mental states. Even social speech is represented as following, not preceding,
egocentric speech.
The hypothesis we propose reverses this
course… The primary function of speech, in both children and adults, is
communication, social contact. The earliest speech of the child is therefore
essentially social.
In his part III, Vygotsky again probes Piaget’s evasiveness.
He writes:
“…many issues in the complex field of child
thinking border on the theory of cognition, on theoretical logic, and on other
branches of philosophy. Time and again Piaget inadvertently touches upon one or
another of these but with remarkable consistency checks himself and breaks off.
Yet in spite of his express intention to avoid theorizing, he does not succeed
in keeping his work within the bounds of pure factual science. Deliberate
avoidance of philosophy is itself a philosophy, and one that may involve its
proponents in many inconsistencies. An example of this is Piaget’s view of the
place of causal explanation in science.
“Piaget attempts to refrain from considering
causes in presenting his findings… Piaget’s whole approach [is] a matter of
purely arbitrary choice.”
Piaget’s apparent refusal of theory is a way of advancing an
actual, but unsupported, theory of self-centredness, one that is consistent
with bourgeois “common sense”. This theory is made to appear as if it is
supported by empirical observation, but Piaget’s observations are of an
absurdly limited sample of children, as is demonstrated in Vygotsky’s
concluding paragraphs.
The inertia around educational theory, and the retention of the
shallow NGO lobbyist Piaget as its “default” theorist for nearly a century, in spite
of his clearly evident deficiencies, is a sign of a lack of self-confidence in
the ranks of the millions of educators around the world, and a sign of their
being trapped under a still larger hegemony, namely that of capitalism in the
age of Imperialism.
This is a situation that is ripe for revolution.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Piaget’s
Theory of Child Language and Thought, Vygotsky, 1932.
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