Dialogue With Jean Piaget

"What is most impressive about this book is its intelligence, its sophistication, and its charm. . . . This book presents Piaget's work and his person better than anything else that I know about."—David Elkind, Tufts University "The tone is one of constant movement from the most ordinary to the most abstruse. There are 14 conversations with 'le Patron,' some in 1969, some in 1975, and several more with co-workers in various fields. . . . In Mr. Bringuier's book, in a pleasant informal way, we see a sophisticated non-scientist exploring Piaget's domain with the master. Some of Piaget's best-known findings about children as explained along the way, but Mr. Bringuier has ways of bringing out the relation of this psychological work to the whole of Piaget's enterprise, and we get a good sense of the man and his work."—Howard E. Gruber, New York Times Book Review

Jean Piaget, although internationally acclaimed for his revolutionary ideas about human intellectual development and how children learn, has been misunderstood by many of those attempting to interpret his theories and apply them. Fortunately, this dialogue between Dr. Evans and Piaget provides the student and general reader with a clear and accurate explanation of his theories and how he arrived at them. As David Elkind writes in the Introduction, Piaget's findings "are effecting a veritable Copernican revolution in our understanding of the growth and functioning of the human mind."

The importance of this remarkable work deserves to be doubly emphasized, for its novelty consists both in the results obtained and in the method by which they have been reached. How does the child think. How does he speak. What are the characteristics of his judgment and of his reasoning. For half a century the answer has been sought to these questions which are those which we meet with at the very threshold of child psychology. If philosophers and biologists have bent their interest upon the soul of the child, it is because of the initial surprise they experienced at his logic and speech. In proof of this, we need only recall the words of Taine, of Darwin and of Egger, which are among the first recorded in the science of child logic.

When first published in 1923, this classic work took the psychological world by storm. Piaget's views expressed in this book, have continued to influence the world of developmental psychology to this day.

Taking a socio-historical and cultural perspective, this book looks at Jean Piaget's own growth from childhood to scientific life. The international and multidisciplinary contributors examine the milieu in which Piaget was born and educated, and search for traces of the experiences, social relationships, commitments and debates that peppered his childhood and adolescence, and informed his future academic career.

Jean Piaget was one of the most salient and inspirational figures in psychological and educational research of the 20th century. He was also prolific, authoring or editing over 80 books and numerous journals and papers which spawned a continuation of his work over the following decades. His work now compromises a major component of many courses on children's psychological development and in a research tradition which is expanding, scholars may need access to the original texts rather than secondhand accounts. This volume is the sixth of nine reproducing Piaget's original works - they are also available as a boxed set.

We have summarized the essential of this book by the author. JEAN PIAGET, THE MAN AND HIS IDEAS Introduction Part A Some observations about the dialogical style and summary of other parts of the book Evans clarifies that he reproduces in this book, as far as possible, the contents of the dialogue between himself and Jean Piaget; with the clarification that few liberties were taken with respect to the basic content of Piaget's responses, translated by Eleanor Duckworth.