Jean Piaget

"The principal 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."

"Play is the work of childhood."

"Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do."

"The child doesn't grow into the adult; but the adult is the child, elaborated."

"To understand is to invent."

"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself."

"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' pleasure in expression and 'real' pleasure in the activity."

"Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death."

"The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover."

"Logic is the morality of thought."

"A person cannot conceive the variable distance between himself and objects of his universe in any precise and law-related manner without concretely and gradually elaborating upon these properties by the definition of the level of his thought."

"Egocentrism is the inability to differentiate between your own perspective and someone else's."

"The principle goal of education is to create individuals who are capable of doing new things."

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

"It is with the aid of these generic images that the imagination recreates the world."

"If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity that characterizes children before it is destroyed by education."

"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate apparent pleasure in expression and to turn this pleasure into a real love of knowledge."

"The most effective way to develop responsibility in students is to give them responsibility."

"Cognitive development is contingent upon physical maturation and experience in the world."

"In order for a child to understand something, he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it."

"The fundamental principle of my educational theory is precisely that the child's activities should be self-motivated."

"Assimilation is the cognitive process by which a person integrates new perceptual matter into pre-existing cognitive structures."

"Accommodation is the modification of a scheme or structure in order that consistency can be retained when new information is incorporated."

"The origin of intelligence is purely a matter of motor activity."

"Obedience is what results when authority is so extreme that the individual cannot even register what the authority is commanding."

"The senses are not merely receptors of ready-made impressions."

"Every object that has been in contact with the child becomes charged, so to speak, with affective value."

"A teacher who educates only for development in reason is neglecting that aspect of human life where knowledge cannot go."

"The chief deficiency I see in the educational enterprise is that teachers would be better advised to assume the role of gardeners rather than painters."

"The child is not less noble than the man; nor is the man nobler than the child."