Does Piaget's theory

Does Piaget's theory ignore the role of social factors in children's development?

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) has provided a rich and complex theory of children’s development in terms of their ‘cognitive’ development, i.e. ability to acquire, store and use knowledge.

He saw children as enquiring scientists who constantly seek knowledge through experiments and develop their own ‘theories’ or ‘schemata’ about the physical/social environment around them. The child is seen as ‘active’ (Modgil, 1974)  and adaptive to the environment through ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’.

From his many experiments on children of differing ages, Piaget identified cognitive development to take place over four major stages (the ages are averages):

1. sensori-motor stage (birth-2 years) – simple reflexes/physical co-ordination.
2. pre-operational (2-7 years) – develops some forms of speech, social interaction and thought processes.
3. concrete operational (7-11 years) – recognition of world through numbers, spatial/temporal issues, classifications, causality
4. formal operational (11 years onwards) – formal, abstract thought emerges. can hypothesise and determine possible outcomes. 

Piaget considered young children to be ‘egocentric’ in nature, i.e. can only see their own viewpoint. Egocentrality is reduced as the child passes to each stage of cognitive development. This is measured using various tasks including the ‘three mountains task’, which looks at what a person looking at the same object but from a different angle to you will see. Piaget found that children tend to choose a picture from a set of different views that closely represents the angle they are seeing themselves, i.e. they have difficulty seeing things from another person’s point of view. Piaget concluded that young children have limited capacity for thinking and reasoning. Even in the case of language development, Piaget sees language as merely an expression of thought without consideration for language as a social interaction. He describes infants and young children as egocentric and lacking in intellectual abilities but ignores how they are able to grasp the complex and sophisticated mechanisms in language acquisition (Donaldson, 1987) .

When Piaget’s ‘individualistic’ experiments are looked at in a ‘real’ world situation, which involve social interactions, it can be seen that Piaget underestimated the importance of social knowledge and cognitive abilities of children. For example, it has been shown that children are able to solve tasks similar to Piaget’s mountains task if they are in a recognisable social context, e.g. Hughes’ (1975)  Policeman Experiment. Many of Piaget’s other experiments have been evaluated and re-designed. As Stuart-Hamilton (1999)  concludes, they are often too difficult and complicated for the age group they are given to. Piaget’s tasks were designed to assess ‘individual’ cognitive capabilities but in reality the tasks he used did suggest social dimension and the social nature of thinking (Light & Oates, 1990). Piaget tended to focus on problems in which there was no perceivable knowledge/experience on the children’s part. However, if the task is presented in a more appropriate and relevant way that includes socially recognisable issues then performance is seen to be better than Piaget presented. For example, Rose and Blank (1974)  showed how slight variations in questioning styles in traditional Piagetian tasks showed how children could be socially subtle by demonstrating knowledge of adult behaviour.
 
When emphasising how a child will interact with his/her environment, Piaget is more concerned with the child’s actual physical environment, e.g. surroundings and objects but does accept ‘affective’ factors in the child’s intellectual development (Mogdil, 1974) . However, Piaget does not really provide much consideration for the social and cultural environment which the child is in and which also affects development. He ignores how a developing child needs to learn particular rules/norms of his/her culture, or how different individuals in his/her life have certain roles, or even expectations due to gender differences. Piaget (1974)  writes, “experience is always necessary for intellectual development”. He recognises the relevance of physical activity and social interactions as part of experience but does not really show how cognitive ‘development’ and the child’s cognitive ‘life’ are linked. Such a view is in stark contrast to other child development theorists such as Vygotsky  who argue that children develop as a result of social factors and interactions and these then stimulate cognitive development. However, as Stuart-Hamilton (1999)  explains, Piaget was originally interested in ‘genetic epistemology’, i.e. study of the growth of knowledge. There is little in Piaget’s work on the child as a ‘social creature’ because his focus throughout his experiments and theories has attempted to understand ‘how’ knowledge is acquired and not on who is acquiring it.

Piaget work is monumental and has changed the way in which we think about children’s development in terms of the sequences involved in cognitive development. Because of the multidisciplinary nature of his work (covering areas such as biology, philosophy, mathematics) his ideas have usefully permeated into many fields, e.g. psychology, paediatrics, sociology, education . For example, in school settings Piaget usefully recommended that teachers only ‘stimulate’ learning because children learn in their own ways at their own pace so should not be forced or pushed into learning materials that are beyond their grasp (cited in Modgil, 1974).