Jean Piaget : Author, Psychologist, Teacher, and Father

On August 9, 1896, Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland. His father was a writer and taught young Piaget about organization and how it related to work. His mother was intelligent yet the extreme changes in temperament made Piaget interested in psychological studies. By age ten Piaget had published his first scientific paper and at the age of twenty two he graduated from the University of Neuchantel with his Ph. D. in science. In 1919, Piaget embarked on a two year period of studies in Paris where he took classes in pathological psychology. It was during this time in Paris, Piaget started working in a laboratory and investigating how and why children reason. He studied children by analyzing their verbal reasoning. This was accomplished by Piaget providing the children with questions that required the children to participate in tasks which related to cause and effect. It was during this two year period of research that Piaget discovered he wanted to work in the field of experimental psychology.

Later in 1921, Piaget became the Research Director at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, Switzerland. At the institute, Piaget planned to study the emergence of intelligence in children. It was during this time he published five books and married. As Piaget advanced through the faculty ranks, he became the Chair of Philosophy in 1925. He also became a father that year to his first daughter. Two years later another daughter was born and four years afterwards, he had a son. Piaget’s children inspired him to observe and record their behavior. He observed the genesis of intelligent behavior, ideas of objective consistency, and causality. Symbolistic behaviors such as imitation and play were also observed and studied. Through his research, Piget learned how intellectual operations are prepared by sensory-motor action, before the appearance of language.