A conversation with Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder

The giant of developmental
psychology and his collaborator
talk about children —
how they learn, when they learn,
what they learn.
Jean Piaget: I must warn you that
I cannot understand English when it
is pronounced properly. If you will say
zis and zat and zhose, I will be able
to follow you.
Elizabeth Hall: And if you promise to
speak French wretchedly, I might
understand you. But luckily we have
Guy Cellerier here to solve our lan­
guage problems.
You and Sigmund Freud are re­
garded as the two giants of 20th-Cen­
tury philosophy. If Freud has changed
our thinking about personality, you
have certainly changed our thinking
about intelligence, yet a great deal of
confusion
surrounds
your
work.
Whenever someone tries to explain
your theories to the rest of us, he
succeeds only in obscuring them.
Piaget: Yes, I’ve seen that done. Per­
haps we will do better today.
Hall: It is interesting that both Fred
Skinner and D. O. Hebb intended to
become novelists.
Piaget: Is that so?
Hall: I was surprised myself when I
first heard it. They regard intelligence
empirically, while you began as a
natural scientist and look at intelli­
gence philosophically.
Piaget: First we must agree on what
you mean by philosophical. All the
problems I have attacked are epistemological. All the methods I have
used are either experimental or for­
malizations
that
Americans
would
also regard as empirical.
Hall: Psychology was originally a part
of philosophy; William James was a
philosopher. You have raided the
field of philosophy again and cap­
tured the area of epistemology.
Piaget: It is true that I have taken
epistemology away from philosophy,
but I have not taken it only for psy­
chology. It belongs in all the sci­
ences; they are all concerned with
the nature and origin of knowledge.
Hall: What caused you to turn from
biology and the study of mollusks to
epistemology?
Piaget: I began to study mollusks
when I was 10. The director of the
Museum of Natural History in Neuchâtel, who was a mollusk specialist,
invited me to assist him twice a week.
I helped him stick labels on his shell
collection and he taught me mala­
cology. I began publishing articles
about shells when I was 15.
Hall: That’s quite young to be pub­
lishing scientific papers.
Piaget: Specialists in malacology are
rare. Because I was so young, I had
to decline invitations from foreign
specialists who wanted to meet me.
My first paper—a one-page report of
a part-albino sparrow I had seen—
was published when I was only 10. It
was about the time that I began to
publish articles on shells that I found
a book on philosophy in my father’s
library. My new passion for philoso­
phy was encouraged when my god­
father introduced me to Henri Berg­
son’s
creative
evolution.
Suddenly
the problem of knowledge appeared
to me in a new light. I became con­
vinced very quickly that most of the
problems in philosophy were prob­
lems of knowledge, and that most
problems of knowledge were prob­
lems of biology. You see, the prob­
lem of knowledge is the problem of
the relation between the subject and
the object—how the subject knows
the object. If you translate this into
biological terms, it is a problem of
the organism’s adapting to its envi­
ronment. I decided to consecrate my
25
In somnolent Switzerland lives a
gracious giant who has upset the
world of developmental psychology.
Jean Piaget, born in Neuchatel on
August 9, 1896, has done more to
shake psychologists’ faith in the
stimulus-response approach to child
psychology than all the humanistic
psychologists of the Third Force put
together. Sigmund Freud discovered
the unconscious, it is said, and Piaget
discovered the conscious.
Piaget believes that reflexes and
other automatic patterns of behavior
have a minor role in the development
of human intelligence. It is only in the
first few days of the infant’s life that
his behavior depends on automatic
behavioral reaction. When Piaget first
put forth this view of infancy it was
radically opposed to accepted theory.
Both Freudian psychology and
traditional behaviorist theory
emphasized that man seeks to escape
from stimulation and excitation, while
Piaget maintained that the infant
often actively seeks stimulation. Some
writers claim that the conflict between
Piaget’s view of intellectual
development and modern behavioral
theory is more apparent than real
and they point to a compatibility
between Piaget’s system and
D. O. Hebb’s neurological theory.
In Piaget’s view of intellectual
development the child passes
through four major periods:
sensori-motor (birth to two years);
pre-operational (two to seven years);
concrete operational (seven to 11
years); and formal operational
26
(above 11 years). It is not until the
growing child reaches the two
operational stages that he begins to
acquire the various concepts of
conservation. When Piaget speaks of
conservation, he refers to the idea
that the mass of an object remains
constant no matter how much the
form changes. For example, if you
give a five-year-old two tumblers,
each half-full of orangeade, he will
agree that there is the same amount
of orangeade in each. But if, before
his eyes, you pour the orangeade
from one glass into a tall, narrow
container, he will say that there is
more orangeade in the new glass
than in the old one. The five-year-old
has no concept of the conservation
of substance. A child who does not
understand the conservation of length
will maintain that a necklace laid out
in a straight line is longer than an
identical necklace that lies in a circle.
The average child acquires both
these concepts by the time he is
eight. Other important conservations
that the child must learn are the
conservation of number, of area, of
weight and of volume.
Piaget tested many of his ideas on
his own three children, watching hour
after patient hour as. Lucienne,
Laurent and Jacqueline developed
through infancy and childhood.
Although his theories have received
increasingly wide attention, Piaget
remains a modest man. He rarely
grants interviews and for 10 years he
has, with some effort, avoided Swiss
television cameras. He feels that time
spent talking with reporters is time
stolen from his work.
It is said that he speaks no
English, and it was with some
trepidation that we scheduled a
bilingual interview. But there was no
need for concern. Piaget perhaps
does not speak English, but he
understands it. Frequently he
answered questions before the
translator could say a word. On one
occasion he interrupted the
translation to say that his reply had
been expanded but that he agreed
with the addition.
At 73, Piaget follows a full
schedule. He teaches four hours a
week, supervises doctoral candidates,
directs both the Institute for Psychol­
ogy and the International Center of
Genetic Epistemology, and edits the
Archives de Psychologie. And he
writes. Each morning he produces his
daily quota of manuscript before most
people are awake. In the summer he
retreats to the Swiss Alps where he
writes in an abandoned farmhouse.
During the year he writes in the
airports of the world. Always at least
two hours early for his plane—and
sometimes as much as five—he
settles down to work, meerschaum
clenched in his teeth, unaware of the
bustle about him. Thirty books and
more than a hundred articles now
bear his name. But he is being
surpassed by his admirers-at the
current rate of publication there soon
will be many more volumes about
Jean Piaget than by Jean Piaget.
—Elizabeth Hall
life to this biological explanation of
knowledge.
Hall: With your interest in the rela­
tion between the subject and the ob­
ject, i am surprised that you did not
become a Gestalt psychologist.
Piaget: If I had come across the writ­
ings of Max Wertheimer and of Wolf­
gang Kohler when I was 18, I would
have. But I was reading psychology
only in French, so I was unacquainted
with their work.
Hall: In your autobiography, you said
that your natural-history background
provided
protection
against
the
demon of philosophy.
Piaget: The demon of philosophy is
taking the easy way out. You believe
that you can solve problems by sit­
ting in your office and reasoning
them out. Because I was a biologist,
I knew that deductions must be made
from facts.
Hall: But after you establish the facts,
then you go back to your office and
work out the problem.
Piaget: Yes. Now, if you don’t have a
philosophical outlook, you probably
won’t be a good scientist. Abstract
reflection is fundamental to seeing
problems clearly. But the error of
philosophy—its demon—is to believe
that you can go ahead and solve the
problem you formulated in the office
without going into the field and es­
tablishing the facts.
Hall: You once wrote that you de­
tested any departure from reality.
Piaget: That was because of my
mother’s poor mental health. At the
beginning of my studies in psychol­
ogy, I was interested in psychoanal­
ysis
and
pathological
psychology
because of her. But I always pre­
ferred the workings of the intellect
to the tricks of the unconscious.
Hall: Does your dislike of unreality
extend to literature?
Piaget: Oh, no. I read many novels—
and I even wrote a philosophical
novel many years ago. Novels are not
pathological.
Hall: I understand that your study of
intelligence came about when you
tried to standardize reasoning tests
at Alfred Binet’s laboratory school in
Paris.
Piaget: It was Binet’s school, but I
was not working on Binet’s test. My
task was to standardize Cyril Burt’s
tests on the children of Paris. I never
actually did it. Standardization was
not at all interesting; I preferred to
study the errors on the test. I became
interested in the reasoning process
behind the children’s wrong answers.
Hall: Has anyone tried to develop an
intelligence
test
based
on
your
research?
Piaget: That kind of research is going
on in two places right now. Here at
the University of Geneva,Vinh Bang—
a Vietnamese psychologist—is work­
ing on a test. And Monique Lauren­
deau and Adrien Pinard, two psychol­
ogists at the University of Montreal,
have been using my experimental
methods and giving all the various
tests to a single child. Just now they
are back-checking to see if their ex­
periments and mine produce similar
results, and they are publishing vol­
umes on different aspects of the
experiments.
Hall: Would such a test have to be
an individual test, or could it be given
to a group of children at one time?
Piaget: The hope is that we will have
a battery of tests that can be given
to a group of children together. The
risk is that we will get deformed
answers.
Hail: Isn’t a group test more likely to
run aground on the same shoals that
wreck the standard tests—a reliance
on the answer instead of the method
of reasoning?
Piaget: The difference will be that the
clinical method will already have
been used in studying the reasoning
of children at each stage of develop­
ment. We will have a background to
help interpret the answers. It will
have advantages that the I. Q. test
lacks because the method of reason­
ing is unknown.
Hall: Your research — especially in
conservation—revealed
that
children
did not understand things that adults
assumed they knew.
Piaget: It’s just that no adult ever had
the idea of asking children about con­
servation. It was so obvious that if
you change the shape of an object,
the quantity will be conserved. Why
ask a child? The novelty lay in ask­
ing the question.
I first discovered the problem of
conservation when I worked with
young epileptics from 10 to 15. I
wanted to find some empirical way of
distinguishing them from normal chil­
dren. I went around with four coins
and four beads, and I would put the
coins and beads in one-to-one cor­
respondence and then hide one of
the coins. If the three remaining coins
were then stretched out into a longer
line, the epileptic children said they
had more coins than beads. No con­
“I always preferred
the workings of the
intellect to the tricks
of the unconscious.”
servation at all. I thought I had dis­
covered a method to distinguish nor­
mal from abnormal children. Then I
went on to work with normal children
and discovered that all children lack
conservation.
Hall: Isn’t it fortunate that you
checked?
Piaget: A biologist would have to ver­
ify; a philosopher would not have
checked.
Hall: When you say that the young
child is egocentric, just what do you
mean?
Piaget: That term has had the worst
interpretations of any word I have
used.
Hall: That’s why I asked the question.
Piaget: When I refer to the child, I
use the term egocentric in an epis­
temological sense, not in an affective
or a moral one. This is why it has
been misinterpreted. The egocentric
child—and all children are egocen­
tric—considers his own point of view
as the only possible one. He is inca­
pable of putting himself in someone
else’s place, because he is unaware
that the other person has a point of
view.
Hall: Would this be analogous to
man’s original belief that the universe
revolved around the earth?
Piaget: That is precisely the example
I was going to give. It is a natural
tendency of the intelligence and it
becomes corrected very slowly as the
child matures. Many children, you
know, believe that the sun and the
moon follow them as they walk. A
28
more prosaic example is the way a
young child makes up a new word
and assumes that everyone knows ex­
actly what he means by it.
Hall: Then morality doesn’t enter the
picture until the child is aware of
other
viewpoints
and
disregards
them. At one time you did extensive
work on the way children develop a
sense of right and wrong.
Piaget: That was 40 years ago and I
haven’t gone back to it. But we can
talk about it if you like.
Hall: I believe you said that the child’s
sense of moral judgment is largely
independent of adult influence.
Piaget: You must distinguish between
two periods in the development of
moral judgment. In the first period, a
child accepts his rules from author­
ity and the ideas of adults are impor­
tant to him. In the second period, he
is independent of adults. Solidarity
grows between children and a moral­
ity develops, based on cooperation.
Hall: As more mothers work, children
are placed in nursery schools at ear­
lier ages, and communal methods of
life, like those in the kibbutz, are be­
coming
more
common.
Suppose
adults did not impose standards of
right and wrong upon children who
were reared in a kibbutz. Would the
children develop this sense of moral
justice and cooperation anyway?
Piaget: It would happen even earlier.
And if the adults are ready to discuss
matters seriously with the children
they will form a system of coopera­
tion with the adults.
Hall: Would the morality that devel­
oped under this cooperative system
be likely to lessen the conflict be­
tween the generations?
Piaget: I would think so. Children
often must discover the idea of jus­
tice at the expense of their parents.
From about the age of seven or
eight, justice prevails over obedi­
ence. But this theory should be
studied experimentally.
Hall: You would have to go out into
the field and test it.
Piaget: I have other pies in the oven.
Hall: I’m interested in the implica­
tions for education of the pies you’ve
already baked. In the United States
we have a concept called reading
readiness. Some educators say that
a child cannot learn to read until he
has reached a mental age of six
years and six months.
Piaget: The idea of reading readiness
corresponds to the idea of compe­
tence in embryology. If a specific
chemical inductor hits the develop­
ing embryo, it will produce an effect
if the competence is there, and if it is
not, the effect will not occur. So the
concept of readiness is not bad but
I am not sure that it can be applied
to reading. Reading aptitude may not
be related to mental age. There could
easily be a difference of aptitude be­
tween children independent of men­
“John Dewey was
a great man.”
tal age. But I cannot state that as a
fact because I have not studied it
closely.
Hall: in recent years the new mathe­
matics has
come into American
schools. Along with a new vocabu­
lary we introduced new concepts like
set theory.
Piaget: Seven years would be per­
fectly all right for most operations of
set theory because children have
their
own
spontaneous
operations
that are very akin to those concepts.
But when you teach set theory you
should use the child’s actual vocabu­
lary along with activity — make the
child do natural things. The impor­
tant thing is not to teach modern
mathematics with ancient methods.
As for teaching children concepts
that they have not attained in their
spontaneous development, it is com­
pletely useless. A British mathemati­
cian attempted to teach his five-yearold daughter the rudiments of set
theory and conservation. He did the
typical experiments of conservation
with numbers. Then he gave the child
two collections and the five-year-old
immediately said those are two sets.
But she couldn’t count and she had
no idea of conservation.
Hall: But she had the vocabulary.
Piaget: That’s the point. You cannot
teach concepts verbally; you must
use a method founded on activity.
Hall: If you had the power in your
hands, would you make any changes
in the school curriculum?
Piaget: We spend so much time
teaching things that don’t have to be
taught. Spelling is a good example.
One learns to spell much better just
by reading; teaching spelling is a
waste of time. And history. We should
reduce the amount of time we spend
making people disgusted with his­
tory. We should concentrate on giv­
ing them a taste for reading history—
which is not the same thing at all.
There is one addition I would like
to make to the curriculum. So far as
I know the experimental method is
not taught in any school and it is a
way of checking your hypotheses. If
we can teach this method to children
they will learn that it is possible to
check their thoughts.
Hall: How would you go about teach­
ing this?
Piaget: In the experimental method
you have the problem of what causes
a given effect. A certain number of
factors intervene and—in order to dis­
cover the cause—you must keep all
factors constant except one.
Hall: As when you gave the children
five flasks of colorless liquid and
asked them to produce yellow.
Piaget: That’s right. One of the flasks
contained only water, another flask
contained bleach, and the other three
liquids that when mixed together
turned yellow. We showed the child
the color but not how to make it. The
child also had to determine just what
sort of liquid was in the flasks that
held bleach and water. Not until a
child reaches the age of 12 does he
test all possible combinations of
fluids and solve the problem.
Hall: What if the teacher were to dem­
onstrate this experiment to the class?
Piaget: It would be completely use­
less. The child must discover the
method
for
himself
through
his
own activity.
Hall: That sounds very much like
John Dewey’s concept of learning by
doing.
Piaget: Indeed it does; John Dewey
was a great man.
Hall: Now that we’ve mentioned an
American educator, may I ask what
you have called “the American ques­
tion”? Is it possible to speed up the
learning of conservation concepts?
Piaget: In turn may I ask the counter­
question? Is it a good thing to accel­
erate the learning of these concepts?
Acceleration is certainly possible but
first we must find out whether it is
desirable or harmful. Take the con­
cept of object permanency—the reali­
zation that a ball, a rattle or a person
continues to exist when it no longer
can be seen. A kitten develops this
concept at four months, a human
baby at nine months; but the kitten
stops right there while the baby goes
on to learn more advanced concepts.
Perhaps a certain slowness is useful
in developing the capacity to assimi­
late new concepts.
We also know that the ease of
learning varies with the develop­
mental level of the child. In the same
number of learning sessions children
who have reached an advanced stage
make marked progress over younger
children. It appears that there is an
optimum speed of development. If
you write a book too slowly it won’t
be a good book; if you write it too
fast it won’t be a good book either.
No one has made studies to deter­
mine the optimum speed.
Hall: But wouldn’t the optimum speed
vary with the person? Some people
naturally write faster than others—
and write just as well.
Piaget: That’s highly possible. We
know the average speed of the chil­
dren we have studied in our Swiss
culture but there is nothing that says
that the average speed is the opti­
mum. But blindly to accelerate the
learning
of
conservation
concepts
could be even worse than doing
nothing.
Hall: I think we ask the American
question because the ever-increasing
length of education troubles us. Many
of us would like to find some way to
shorten those years that go into pro­
fessional preparation.
Piaget: It is difficult to decide just
how to shorten studies. If you spend
one year studying something verbally
that requires two years of active
study, then you have actually lost a
year. If we were willing to lose a bit
more time and let the children be ac­
tive, let them use trial and error on dif­
ferent things, then the time we seem
to have lost we may have actually
gained. Children may develop a gen­
era! method that they can use on
other subjects.
Hall: And we come back to learning
by doing. Some of your experiments
“Blindly to accelerate
the learning of
conservation concepts
could be even worse
than doing nothing.”
with the child’s concept of space in­
dicate that children come to a Euclid­
ean world view very slowly. Does this
same conception of space evolve in
all peoples, or is it a feature of West­
ern culture?
Piaget: I wouldn’t say that Euclidean
geometry is cultural. You know, his­
torically
scientific
geometry
began
with Euclidean metric geometry. Pro­
jective geometry followed and only
later did we develop topology. But so
far as theory goes, both projective
and metric geometry can be derived
from topology. Now if you examine
the way a child develops his idea of
space, you will see that he first de­
velops topological intuitions, so that
the child’s ideas are closer to mathe­
matical theory than to history. To get
back to your question, any group—if
they develop that far—would certainly
acquire a Euclidean geometry, be­
cause once you have the topological
intuitions and actual measurement, it
is the simplest geometry.
Hall: Then you do not believe that our
language determines the way we see
the world?
Piaget: There is a very close relation­
ship between language and thought,
but
language
does
not
govern
thoughts or form operations. It is lan­
guage that is influenced by opera­
tions and not our operations that are
influenced by language.
Dr. H. Sinclair has made some
interesting
experiments
along
this
line. She had two groups of children;
one group had conservation, the
other group did not. She took the
group of children that did not under­
stand conservation and taught them
the language used by the children
who understood the concept. They
learned to use “long” and “short”
and “wide” and “narrow” in a con­
sistent way. She wanted to see if the
concepts would come once the lan­
guage was learned. They did not. If
a ball of clay was pulled into a sau­
sage, the children could describe it
as “long” and “thin.” But they did
not understand that the clay was
longer but thinner than the ball and
therefore the same quantity.
Hall: What if the language does not
express a concept?
Piaget: The thing that changes with
different languages is the way we par­
tition reality—the way we break the
world into composing parts. But this
translation of concepts into their
parts is not essential to thought.
Hall: Jerome Bruner has studied child
development extensively and he is
31
one of your respectful critics. Could
you explain to me the difference be­
tween your theoretical approach and
that of Bruner’s?
Piaget: It is very difficult to explain
the difference between Bruner and
me. Bruner is a mobile and active
man and has held a sequence of dif­
ferent points of view. Essentially Bru­
ner does not believe in mental
operations while I do. Bruner re­
places operations with factors that
have varied through his different
stages—Bruner’s
stages,
not
the
child’s. Bruner uses things like lan­
guage, like image. When Bruner was
at the stage of strategies he used to
say that his strategies were more or
less Piaget’s operations. At that time
our theories were closest. Since then
he has changed his point of view.
Hall: Might we say that one day Bru­
ner may reach the operational stage?
Piaget: The answer to your question
is that Bruner is an unpredictable
man—this is what makes his charm.
Hall: Can we learn about man only
by studying man? Or can we go into
the laboratory and study rats and
primates?
Piaget: Comparative studies are nec­
essary but one must not make the
mistake of believing that a rat is
“Many theories
of some schools
that I will not name
are based on the rat.
It is not enough
for me.”
sufficient. Many theories of some
schools that I will not name are
based on the rat. It is not enough
for me.
Hall: But I can mention a school of
psychology. Could you describe your
differences with behaviorism?
Piaget: That’s too broad a term. Let’s
talk instead about behaviorist empiri­
cism; I think that’s what you’re really
asking about. Empiricism implies that
reality can be reduced to observable
features and that knowledge must
limit itself to those features. Biolo­
gists have shown that the organism
constantly interacts with its environ­
ment; the view that it submits pas­
sively to the environment has become
untenable. How then can man be
simply a recorder of outside events?
When he transforms his environment
by acting upon it he gains a deeper
knowledge of the world than any copy
of reality ever could provide. What is
more empiricism cannot explain the
existence of mathematics which deals
with unobservable features and with
cognitive constructions.
In biology the exact counterpart of
behaviorist empiricism is the La­
marckian theory of variation and evo­
lution—a
long-abandoned
doctrine.
When we look at the famous stimulus-
response schema we find that be­
haviorist psychologists have retained
a strictly Lamarckian outlook. The
contemporary
biological
revolution
has passed them by. If we are to get
a tenable stimulus-response theory
we must completely modify its clas­
sical meaning. Before a stimulus can
set off a response the organism must
be capable of providing it. We talked
earlier about the idea of competence
in embryology. If this concept applies
in learning —and my research indi­
cates that it does—then learning will
be different at different develop­
mental levels. It would depend upon
the evolution of competences. The
classical concept of learning sud­
denly becomes inadequate.
Hall: Does this mean that individual
development is all innate?
Piaget: Not at all. Each man is the
product of interaction between he­
redity and environment. It is virtually
impossible to draw a clear line be­
tween innate and acquired behavior
patterns.
Hall: Are there any pitfalls to trap
the unwary psychologist?
Piaget: The danger to psychologists
lies in practical applications. Too
often psychologists make practical
applications before they know what
they are applying. We must always
keep a place for fundamental re­
search and beware of practical ap­
plications when we do not know the
foundation of our theories.
Hall: How do you see the future of
psychology?
Piaget: With optimism. We see new
problems every day.
Across
the Rhone River from the
University of Geneva, on the other
side of the lake, the Palais Wilson
stands in a wide lawn. Pansies bloom
along the tree-lined quay and down
the street Charles II, Duke of
Bismarck, rests in his elaborate
sepulcher, guarded by his equestrian
statue and a flock of pigeons. On the
wall that surrounds the palace, a
plaque honors the memory of
Woodrow Wilson, President of the
United States and founder of the
League of Nations.
The Palais Wilson houses the Jean
Jacques Rousseau Institute, a part of
the University devoted to psychology
and education. Just next to the
Institute, beside the ultra-modern,
tourist-filled Hotel President, is a
(Continued on page 54.)
A Conversation (Continued from page 32.)
kindergarten where students from all
over the world study the unfolding
of the child mind.
Bärbel Inhelder works in a narrow,
book-lined office in the Palais Wilson.
She is a professor of developmental
psychology, and she began her
collaboration with Piaget while she
was an undergraduate. Together they
have written more than nine books,
and she is the author of more than 50
articles. She is President of the
Association de Psychologie
Scientifique de Langue Française and
a past president of the Swiss
Psychological Society. In 1968, with
Piaget, she received the Award of the
American Educational Research
Association. She has been a Harvard
research fellow and a Rockefeller
fellow and has lectured at M.I.T.,
Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, Temple
and Penn State. (Her English, which
has a slight German accent, is fluent.)
The primitive life holds great
attraction for Inhelder. She spends
her summers in a remote cabin in the
Alps “far away from everything.”
There she depends on candlelight
and draws her own water, and there—
like Piaget—she writes.
54
Hall: Did you always plan to become
a psychologist?
Bärbel Inhelder: It is mostly a matter
of chance. I was born in Saint Gall, in
the German part of Switzerland. Orig­
inally I came to Geneva for a summer
course at the University. I wanted to
learn some French. I had some back­
ground in biology and in education,
and then I discovered psychology
and Edouard Claparède and Piaget
here at the University. Originally I
thought I would study psychology for
a few years. Then I liked it so much
that I stayed on to take my doctorate.
After I had been at the University
for a few weeks, first Claparède and
then Piaget asked me to do some
research.
Hall: In the United States it is highly
unusual for a first-year student to be
asked to do research.
Inhelder: It is not so very unusual
here. During my first year of training,
Piaget asked me to put some sugar
in water and study children’s reac­
tions to what they saw. This led to
our work on conservation concepts.
My first publication was on conserva­
ation. I still remember the day when
Piaget said: “Now look. I have some
ideas on this. Let’s write a book to­
gether.” So I wrote my first book with
Piaget before I delivered my thesis.
Hall: That’s exciting.
Inhelder: I was just lucky.
Hall: That was more than chance.
What happened after you finished
your doctoral?
Inhelder: I went back to Saint Gall,
where the cantonal authorities asked
me to create a school psychology
service. There I began to study the
reasoning processes of mentally re­
tarded children and in 1943 I deliv­
ered my thesis based on this work.
It was not published in English until
many years later. (The Diagnosis of
Reasoning in the Mentally Retarded,
John Day, 1968.)
Hall: Did you do any research into
the causes of retardation?
Inhelder: I was more concerned with
diagnosing the retardation than de­
termining its cause. To start with, my
job was to go from one village to the
next and examine the children and
find out the best way of diagnosing
retardation.
Hall: Did you find that mentally re­
tarded children develop conserva­
tion theories?
Inhelder: They develop them much
later but they go through exactly the
same steps normal children do.
Using this developmental approach,
it was relatively easy to distinguish
between
pseudodefective
children
and the truly retarded.
Hall: What caused the pseudodefec­
tive children to be labeled as feeble­
minded?
Inhelder: Often the children were so­
cially
deprived.
Sometimes
they
would have specific defects like dys­
lexia or aphasia. Under the global
approach, they had all been consid­
ered retarded. We found that such
defects would respond to a specific
kind of help.
Hall: Have you reached any conclu­
sions as to the causes of mental
retardation?
Inhelder: No, I have not. I am a psy­
chologist. We would need a whole
team of psychologists, biochemists,
geneticists and sociologists to even
try to determine some of the causes
of mental retardation.
Hall: Do you think we will ever be
able to determine what is environ­
mental and what is hereditary?
Inhelder: I’m not sure if that is the
right way to ask the question. I know
the whole problem of heredity and
environment has been given renewed
attention. In fact, it’s experimentally
impossible to separate the two fac­
tors in human beings.
Hall: There seems to be no way to
construct a study that would elimi­
nate environmental influences.
Inhelder: No way at all. If one suc­
ceeds in training our young patients
to overcome their specific difficulty
then it is likely that their potential
was more or less normal. From the
psychological point of view that’s
about the only thing we can do. In
fact we did all kinds of training stud­
ies with a group of children with dif­
ferent difficulties who weren’t able
to go through normal school training.
As a result of our training method—
which is an application of our funda­
mental studies in growth and devel­
opment—they were able to gain a lot.
But one or two of them did not gain
at all, so it is highly probable that
their potential was not high enough.
You have to take each case individ­
ually and devote a lot of time to it.
Hall: So there is no easy way out.
I was greatly interested in the paper
you gave me yesterday. The results
you got on the memory studies were
remarkable.
Inhelder: The results were in accord
with our theories on the development
of thought. We showed the children
10 sticks that varied in length and
then asked them to draw the sticks
from memory. The children under
four drew a line of roughly equal
sticks; those under five drew groups
of paired, unequal sticks. At about
five they often drew three groups of
sticks—small, medium size and large
ones. A month or two later they
began to draw a series in ascending
length but it was not complete. It’s
only at about six that the children’s
drawing became correct evocations
of what they had seen.
Hall: It was their recall after six
months that was so interesting.
Inhelder: Yes. We asked the same
children to reproduce the line of
sticks again. But we did not show
them sticks. After six to eight months
a majority of the children remem­
bered the arrangement better than
they had just after they had seen the
sticks; that is to say their recall was
one “stage” better.
Hall: Just how does this support your
theories?
Inhelder:
Classical
associationist
empiricism considers the image to
be the residual product of percep­
tion—and a fundamental element of
thought. We, however, believe that
children progressively structure re­
ality by means of operations which
gradually increase in complexity. Ac­
cording to this theory, the memory
code itself depends on the subject’s
55
operations and the code will be mod­
ified during development.
Hall: That means that the memory of
things for which children are devel­
oping concepts will improve as their
concepts improve.
Inhelder: You might put it that way.
It indicates that memory images do
not stem from perception; they are
linked to operational schemes. These
schemes control the images and are
dominant over the model that has
been seen.
Hall: That is impressive. You have
been studying children with Profes­
sor P i a g e t f o r 3 3 y e a r s . W h a t
changes would you make in the
school curriculum?
Inhelder: There is quite a lot to do
in this field. We must first determine
more of the developmental laws; we
must find out how the child is able
to a s s i m i l a t e t h r o u g h h i s o w n
schemes the knowledge we try to
pass on to him. I think it is also very
important to know the most funda­
mental structures of the sciences,
grammar and mathematics we want
to teach. For this we need the help
of good mathematicians, good physi­
cists and good linguists.
“George Miller once
called himself a
subjective behaviorist.
If we must be
labeled, you could
say the same
thing about us.”
Hall: You’re not talking about the
elementary teachers, but about the
teachers of teachers?
Inhelder: I’m really talking about the
people who can best help in this
research. Here in our center of epis­
temology we bring together the sci­
entists in the different disciplines
—
linguistics,
logic,
mathematics,
physics and developmental psychol­
ogy. The scientists give us a heuris­
tic for our research and we can pass
on what we learn about develop­
mental laws to the teachers.
Hall: So your changes would be more
in the education of teachers than in
the curriculum?
Inhelder: We can train the teachers
to make curriculum studies and we
can give them advice based on our
studies, but I think that the educa­
tors themselves must work out their
own curriculum.
Hall: What kind of advice might you
give them?
Inhelder: The order of the introduc­
tion of the fundamental mathematical
concepts might be changed to con­
form to the developmental laws of
the child. We could give training in
topology very early because it is
based on much more elementary
structures than is Euclidean geome­
try. But even Euclidean geometry
should not be delayed until the child
reaches
secondary
school.
Basic
concepts in mathematics and in sci­
ence can be introduced to children
from seven to 10, if these are di­
vorced from their traditional mathe­
matical context.
Hall: Would you have the children
do more things themselves instead of
just sitting and reading and being
lectured to?
Inhelder: Oh, sure. The other essen­
tial for introducing basic scientific
ideas early is that they be studied
through materials that the child can
handle himself. Through games for
example we can teach probabilistic
reasoning long before the child can
learn the techniques of the calculus
of probabilities or the formal expres­
sions of probability theory. In a sci­
ence-and-mathematics
pre-curricu­
lum, we can establish an intuitive and
inductive understanding that will give
the child a much firmer foundation
on which to build his later formal
studies.
Hall: You sound optimistic; how do you
feel about the future of psychology?
Inhelder: Quite hopeful.
Hall: So is Professor Piaget.
Inhelder: He likes the profession, as
I do.
Hall: There are so many schools of
psychology today—analytic and hu­
manist and behaviorist and pseudobehaviorist
and
neobehaviorist...
Inhelder:
And
even
neo-neo-neo
behaviorist.
Hall: You use empirical methods in
your work, but your theoretical ap­
proach is not that of the behaviorist.
Inhelder: George Miller once called
himself a subjective behaviorist. If we
must be labeled, you could say the
same thing about us. We have a
much more relativistic approach in
regard to what is innate and what is
acquired than do the behaviorists,
and we hold a constructivist position
on development and on the construc­
tions that are going on inside the
black box.
Hall: Will we ever get inside the black
box?
Inhelder: We can study the input to
the box and see how the output
changes with age. We can infer some
rules, then do more experiments and
make new inferences. These are the
only things we can do.