Running head: A DELVE INTO THE MAN BEHIND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 1
A Delve into the Man Behind Cognitive Development
A Biography of the Great Jean Piaget
Abel Bunn
Cirillo — D.C. PSYC-2301
April 26th, 2019
A DELVE INTO THE MAN BEHIND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 2
Abstract
This paper biographies Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist who was renowned for his immense
alms to the field of psychology, especially when concerning his emphasis on the adequate
growth and proper education of children. He was most well known for his theory of cognitive
development which has long since been utilized in many a classroom and educational program to
ensure and foster constructive and fruitful youths who would be equipped with all the necessary
tools for success in later life due to its insightful look at how children perceive and contextualize
the world around them.
A DELVE INTO THE MAN BEHIND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 3
A Delve into the Man Behind Cognitive Development
A Biography of the Great Jean Piaget
The great Swiss psychologist, Jean William Fritz Piaget, was born on the 9th of August,
1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and would die the 16th of September, 1980 in Geneva. Having
studied epistemology at the University of Neuchâtel and briefly at the University of Zürich,
Piaget was well on his way to major breakthroughs in the discipline and would publish two
philosophical papers which would be the indicator of his eventual conceptual endowment
towards the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. Following his graduation, he would leave
Switzerland for France and go on to teach at the Grange-Aux-Belles Street School for Boys,
which was known for its headmaster, Alfred Binet, the creator of the Binet-Simon Test for
intelligence. It was here that Piaget would go on to refine his approach to educating and shaping
the lives of children for generations to come. In fact, following his marriage with Valentine
Châtenay, his partner for life, at the turn of the 20th century, Piaget would refine his theories that
the minds of the young were cognitively disparate from that of their adult counterparts on his
own three children. He was of the opinion that children had a unique and varying interpretation
of the world which would elicit certain predictable responses and was adverse to do anything to
stifle their natural behavior, rather, he observed how he could best utilize this to cultivate
effective rapport and functional support for the younglings, as did his own family members do
for him growing up — reassuring his posits and curiosities as they became his passions and
fixations. An especially formative experience would be his experience with the false memory of
a kidnapping that his former nanny made-up in his youth as it piqued his interest as to why and
how he could so clearly produce and recall memories of an incident that never happened. He
A DELVE INTO THE MAN BEHIND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 4
would live the rest of his life bouncing from university to university, teachin...
