Content

Introduction

Educationist background

The educationist contributions towards educations.

-Cognitive development

-In Malaysian Education System

- Conceptualization of autonomy as the aim of education

Awards and recognition received

-Piagets Principal Appointments

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9

The importance of recognition and contributions of Piaget towards the

development professionalism and leadership in education.

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Conclusion

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References

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Jean Piaget
Introduction
Gaining education enhances an individual to live a respectful life in the society. This is
because education offers a setting in which culture and values of a society are developed. We
can say that education is the most crucial part of our life as a human being.
Education is an important tool that is applied in the contemporary world to
succeed, as it mitigates the challenges which are faced in life. The knowledge
gained through education enables individuals potential to be optimally utilized
owing to training of the human mind (Epstein, 2014).
Behind all the educational system and philosophy, there are numbers of educationists
who are popular with all their works and contribution. According to Cambridge Dictionary,
educationist is a person who has a special knowledge of the principles and methods of
teaching. (Davis, 1993) stated that the term educationist refers to a specialist in the theory of
education. One of the educationists that were successful in the field of education is Jean Piaget.
He is a role model that was admired for his effort and all his theories in education are still
relevant and being used until nowadays.

Educationist background

Jean Piaget was born on August 9, 1896, in Neuchtel, Switzerland, the son of a
historian. His full name is Jean William Fritz Piaget. He is the first
child of Arthur and Rebecca-Suzanne Piaget. He grew up with
his two sisters Madeleine and Marthe in Neuchtel. (Kohler,
2014) wrote in his book, Arthur (Piagets father) was a fantastic
father, broad-minded and full of understanding for his sons
vocation. The uniting element between father and son was
intellectual achievement, as the father taught his son the value of
systematic work, even in a small matter. Father and son had an
ambivalent relationship; Jean admired his father and was fond of
him. Much of Piaget's childhood was influenced by what he saw
in his father, a man intensely dedicated to his studies and work.
Because of this, at an early age Piaget began passing up recreation for studying, particularly the
study of the natural sciences.
At just 10 years old, Piagets fascination with mollusks drew him to the local museum of
natural history, where he stared at specimens for hours on end. Piaget's help in classifying
Neuchtel's natural-history museum collection inspired his study of mollusks (shellfish). When
he was eleven, his notes on a rare part-albino (having extremely pale or light skin) sparrow were
published, the first of hundreds of articles and over fifty books (Tryphon, 1999). By the time he
was a teen, his papers on mollusks were being widely published in various magazines. Piagets
readers were unaware of his age and considered him an expert on the topic. Piaget was forced
to keep his young age a secret. Many editors felt that a young author had very little credibility.
One article, written when he was fifteen, led to a job offer at a natural history museum in
Geneva, Switzerland; he declined in order to continue his education.
After high school, Piaget went on to study zoology at the University of Neuchtel,
receiving his Ph.D. in the natural sciences in 1918. In the same year, Piaget spent a semester
studying psychology under Carl Jung and Paul Eugen Bleuler at the University of Zrich, where
Piaget developed a deeper interest in psychoanalysis. After a semester spent at the University
of Zrich where he developed an interest for psychoanalysis, he left Switzerland for France. He
spent a year at a Boys Institute France that was created by Alfred Binet and De Simon who
happened to establish the measurements test for intelligence. These intelligence tests helped
Piaget as he applied them and did his first experimental work and studied the growth of the
mind. He later went back to Switzerland where he began observing children in their natural
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environment and recorded what they said and did. In 1921, he became director of studies at the
J.-J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva at the request of Sir Ed. Claparde and P. Bovet.
As we all know, Piaget is very famous for his study about children. His passion for kids
started after he married Valentine Chatenay. the couple had three children, Jacqueline,
Lucienne and Laurent. Being that their father had a passion for childrens ways of thinking,
Piaget studied their intellectual development from infancy to the time they could speak. Piaget
passion for kids led him to the belief that childrens logic and modes of thinking are completely
different from that of adults. He quotes his theory as, learning is no more than a sector of
cognitive development that is facilitated by experience (Papert, 1999). Acording to (Kagan,
2000) in his book The Psychology of the Child, Piaget found four stages of mental growth while
studying children, particularly his own: a sensory-motor stage, a pre-operational stage, a
concrete operational stage, finally, a formal operational stage.
Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner and others introduced Piaget's ideas to the United
States around 1956, after his books were translated into English. The goal of American
education in the late 1950s, to teach children how to think, called for further interest in Piaget's
ideas. His defined stages of when children's concepts change and mature came from
experiments with children. These ideas are currently favored over the later developed stimulusresponse theory of behaviorist psychologists, who have studied animal learning. Piaget's
theories developed over years. Further explanations and experiments were performed, but
these refinements did not alter his basic beliefs or theories.
His researches in developmental psychology had one unique goal: how does knowledge
grow? His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically
embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less powerful
logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood (Smith, 2000). Jean Piaget
died of unknown causes on September 16, 1980, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was 84 years old.
His body rests at the Cimetire des Plainpalais. Piaget is responsible for developing entirely
new fields of scientific study, including cognitive theory and developmental psychology. The
recipient of the prestigious Bazlan(1978) prizes summed up his passion for the ongoing pursuit
of scientific knowledge with these words: "The current state of knowledge is a moment in
history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in
many instances, more rapidly."

The educationist contributions towards educations.

Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget was a successful person in his career. His
biggest contribution in our educational system is about the
children psychology. The work of Jean Piaget has been
labeled as constrictive and interacting. Before the time of Jean
Piaget, child psychology was not given that much importance.
You can also say that, before the time of Jean Piaget, there
was no such thing as child psychology. Central to Piagets
theory is the idea that children develop their own theories
about the world around them and that these theories are based on personal interactions with
people and the environment. Children use schemas (actions that make things happen) to gain
information about their environment and that these schema grow as children develop (Davidson,
2014). A childs cognition increases as the child develops, and his way of understanding his
world similarly grows and develops. Piaget also mentions that the understanding thoughts of a
child are constructed through a number of channels, which include, listening, reading,
experiencing, and exploring the place they live in or the environment they grow up in.
Piagets ultimate conclusion, based on his study of the way that children amass
knowledge, was that childrens reasoning is not flawed, but rather their limited life experiences
cause them to come to different conclusions about information than do adults. For Piaget the
essence of knowledge was not about being able to repeat learned facts, but rather about
assimilating information in order to make sense of it (Laura, 2011). Malaysian National
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Educational System also follows this theory where teachers are responsible to teach the pupils
to assimilate and understand the information rather than memorize it.
One of the most admirable additions to the child psychology by Jean Piaget is the
Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development. According to (Strauss, 2001) cognitive is a
psychological process involved in acquisition and understanding of knowledge, formation of
beliefs and attitudes, and decision making and problem solving. They are distinct from
emotional and volitional process involved in wanting and intending. Piaget studied the
intellectual development of his own three children and continues with the other children, and this
study led him to develop the theory that described the four stages that children pass through in
the development of intelligence and formal thought processes. While all children advance
through the stages in the same order, some progress more rapidly than others. As mention in
earlier part, the four stages of development that mention by Piaget are a sensory-motor stage, a
pre-operational stage, a concrete operational stage, finally, a formal operational stage. Piaget
believed that children's understanding through at least the first three stages differ from those of
adults and are based on actively exploring the environment (surroundings) rather than on
language understanding. He adds that when children answered questions, even if an adult
corrected them, they still werent wrong. This was because they answered the question within
their framework of their own knowledge from what they see or experience.
From the book Piaget and Education Primer written by (Wiliam, 2006), he explained all
the stages in detail. Sensory-motor stage is where a childs cognitive system is limited to his
motor reflexes. Children in this stage learn from their caregivers, imitating what they see and
hear, experimenting with sounds, and learning that they have some control of their movements.
During this stage children develop object permanence and build cognitive structures regarding
how the world responds to them. The second stage is Pre-Operational stage, in this phase
children are egocentric, seeing what happens around them only from their own point of view.
Thinking is not logical at this stage, during which children begin to use language and mental
imagery. Visual representation and hands-on experiences are necessary for children at this
stage; they cannot form abstract ideas. For Concrete-Operational stage, (Wiliam, 2006)
explained it as children move from their egocentric point of view and are capable of taking
another persons perspective and incorporating more than one view simultaneously. They can
see and reason with concrete knowledge, but are unable to look at the abstract side of things
and develop all the possible outcomes. Last but not least, the Formal Operational stage. During
this stage a child is acquiring a knowledge base and cognitive structures that are similar to that
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of an adult. Logical, abstract, and theoretical thinking increases and children can use symbols
related to abstract concepts in order to solve problems (Patterson, 2005). It is important to note
that Piaget did not view children's intellectual development as a quantitative process; that is,
kids do not just add more information and knowledge to their existing knowledge as they get
older. Instead, Piaget suggested that there is a qualitative change in how children think as they
gradually process through these four stages. A child at age 7 doesn't just have more information
about the world than he did at age 2; there is a fundamental change in how he thinks about the
world.
In general, all teachers as well as others who work with children, can benefit from an
awareness of these stages of development. Knowing when a child needs a practical application
of an idea versus being able to use abstract reasoning can determine what information is
presented and how it is presented. The use of symbols to represent an abstract idea, for
instance, is not a skill that younger children will have, so presenting information before a child is
ready will result in frustration and an unwillingness to engage in an activity. Understanding these
stages of development can aid the instructor or care-giver in planning age- and
developmentally-appropriate activities and lessons that will keep children engaged and active in
the classroom or playroom.

In Malaysian Education system

Piaget's theory on stages of cognitive development has had a major impact on the
practice of education in Malaysia. It helped in giving the attention upon the idea of providing the
education based on appropriate development of childrens cognitive level. This refers to an
education in which the environments, curriculum, materials and instruction used are consistent
with pupils physical and cognitive abilities as well as their social and emotional needs. Besides
that, in our education system, the pupils will be taught according to stages. In other words, the
Piagets theory has influence our education system to separate the students into different level
according to their stage of age (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2000). The syllabus is designed
to suit the pupils level and their age, starting from the play school until higher education. For
example in our country, children aged 4 6 years are in preschool level. Children at this stage
are taught through pictures, singing, colouring and also playing. While student at the primary
school already started to focus on the text book, experiment and test. This is similar to Piagets

symbolic function sub-stages, his theory generated significant changes in early childhood and
primary education throughout our country.
Piaget says that in learning, we must focus on the process of children thinking, not just
its product. Instead of simply checking for a correct answer, teachers should emphasize the
student's understanding and the process they used to get the answer. Unlike KBSR, the new
implementation of curriculum KSSR is no longer exam oriented, but in contrast the pupils are
being assessed from time to time. They are graded according to their performance throughout
the whole year and not just focusing on the final year exam. The government also had
implemented SBA (school-based assessment) to strengthen the education system. SBA is an
assessment which is embedded in the teaching and learning process. It involves the teacher
from the beginning to the end: from planning the assessment programme, to identifying and/or
developing appropriate assessment tasks right through to making the assessment judgments.
Our former Minister of Education, Tan Sri Muhyiddin mentions in his speech The school based
assessments were implemented to move away from focusing on just examinations, the
(present) evaluation is basically based on curriculum-achievements we would like to see a
more rounded sort of education achievements among our children (Daily Express, 6 June
2009). According to the former Malaysia Director of Education, Tan Sri Murad Mohd. Noor, The
attitude of too obsess to too many standardized examinations in the national education system
are the factors to not being able to achieve maximum level of creativity and innovation. Too
many examinations at primary, secondary and university levels cause students to not having
time to develop their talents, ability and potentials in an area of interest (Utusan Malaysia, 29th
September 2005). From all the changes happened in our countrys education system, we can
see that the Piagets theory also play a role in positively influence the changes that happen,
especially the part where Piaget focus on the process instead of product in education.

Conceptualization of autonomy as the aim of education

The next contribution by Piaget in education is his theory of conceptualization of
autonomy in educates the children. In his theory, Piaget mentions that autonomy does not mean
the right to make decisions. It means the ability to make decisions by taking relevant factors into
account, independently of reward and punishment. According to (Veugelers, 2011), autonomy is
the opposite of heteronomy, which means being unable to make decisions for oneself and
therefore being governed by others. This theory against the Skinners Behavioral theory as the
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main aim for autonomy is free from reward or punishment system. Piaget explained this theory
with this sentence;
We must refrain from using reward and punishments and encourage
children to construct moral values for themselves. Adult reinforces childrens
heteronomy when they use reward and punishment, and they stimulate the
development of autonomy when they exchange of view with the children.
Piaget against the use of punishment and award in
education because for him, the childrens behavior or outcome is
not sincerely coming from them self, it is influence by the exterior
factor. (Bridges, 2002) support this theory by saying that there
are three possible outcomes when using punishment to the
children. The most possible outcome is calculation of risk. In this
situation, the children will still repeat the same act but will try to
avoid being caught the next time. The second possible outcome
is called blind conformity. The child who is punished becomes
total conformist, they no longer have to make decision, and all they have to do is obey. The third
possible outcome according to Bridges is revolt. Some children after years of angelic behavior,
decide that they are tired of pleasing their parents and teacher all the time, the time has come
for them to begin living for themselves. The use of reward also shows the same outcome like
punishment. Children who help their parent to get money, or who study only to get prizes, just
the same like children who behave well only to avoid punishment. Adult exercise power over
children by using reward and punishment keep children
obey but in the same time will also demotivate the children
cognitive development where they cannot use the
autonomy to creatively think and act according to their
own will.

Awards and recognition received

He was awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1972 by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for his
contributions to European culture, society, and social science. EDIT
He was presented honorary degrees from prestigious universities like Harvard, Manchester,
Cambridge and many others for his contribution to development psychology.
Piaget published more than 50 books and 500 papers as well as 37 volumes in the series
"Etudes d'Epistmologie Gntique" (Studies in Genetic Epistemology).

Piagets Principal Appointments

1921-25

Research Director, Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva

1925-29

Professor of Psychology, Sociology and the Philosophy of Science, University of

Neuchatel

1929-39

Professor of the History of Scientific Thought, University of Geneva

1929-67

Director, International Bureau of Education, Geneva

1932-71

Director, Institute of Educational Sciences, University of Geneva

1938-51

Professor of Experimental Psychology and Sociology, University of Lausanne

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1939-51

Professor of Sociology, University of Geneva

1940-71

Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of

Geneva
1952-64

Professor of Genetic Psychology, Sorbonne, Paris

1955-80

Director, International Centre for Genetic Epistemology,

Geneva
1971-80

Emeritus Professor, University of Geneva

The importance of recognition and contributions of Piaget towards

the development professionalism and leadership in education.
Leadership means ability to lead and the leadership capacity relies to ones capability
as a leader and strength of a leader. Leadership capacity is seen as an influence, an art or a
process of influencing people so that they will strive willingly and enthusiastically towards the
achievement of common goals (Marion, 2014). Piaget, who stands among those permanent
educators, becomes influential over his contributions on education which in return develop the
professionalism and leadership in education. Many other educators have sprung upon the basis
of Piagets works and his contributions are what make the leaders today.
Piaget possesses the natural leadership style in which as defined in Leadership and
Teacher Professional Development, that has his own advantages which enable him to lead.
Besides that, as stated in this book, natural leadership also means that a group of people will be
led by an influential person, although he may not be formally appointed (Marion, 2014).His
contribution on the teaching pedagogy and the four stages of development is rather notable in
our current school system today. His inspiration on the children psychology field reflects on his
capability as a natural leader. Piagets effort and contributions on trying to make differences as
well as change it to a better one in various aspects of education promote the skill of leadership
on natural which turn him into a highly admired and respected leader.
In conclusion, Piagets works and contribution on education as well as his beliefs is
precious especially when it became a great influence on development of professionalism and

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leadership in education. Besides, his influential is also applicable in world-wide context and also
assist the self-development of novice teachers.

Conclusion
Jean Piaget was a landmark in the history of ideas during the twentieth century. Without
him, the history of psychology, especially developmental psychology and the history of
pedagogy would have taken a different course. Both the quantity and the breadth of his work
are striking. He wrote and lectured in zoology, evolution theory, philosophy, psychology,
pedagogy, sociology, theology, mathematics, logic, epistemology, and science history. These
contributions form an entire system in the universalistic tradition of Enlightenment and are
intended to help improve the world (Kohler, 2014).
Piaget did not become a child psychologist because he was particularly interested in
children but his research into cognitive development helped him establish a theory that would
explain our ways of thinking and thus explain the world. All the Piagets hardwork and
contribution towards education really influence not just Malaysian education system, but the
whole world used his theory to reinforce their education system.

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References
Bridges, D. (2002). Education, Autonomy and Democratic Citizenship: Philosophy in a
Changing World. New York: Routledge Publication.
Davidson. (2014, May 13). Piagets Theory of Cognitive Development. Retrieved August 3,
2015, from http://blog.childdevelopmentmedia.com/the-enduring-contributions-of-jeanpiaget/
Davis, V. (1993). William Waynflete, Bishop and Educationalist. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press.
Epstein, J. (2014). A Literary Education. New York: Axios Press.
Kagan, J. (2000). The Psychology Of The Child. New York: Basics Book.
Kohler, R. (2014). Jean Piaget. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Laura, L. (2011). Child Psychology and Development For Dummies. Hoboken: Wiley
Publication.
Marion, R. (2014). Leadership in Education: Organizational Theory for the Practitioner, Second
Edition. Long Grove: Waveland.
Papert, S. (1999). Jean Piaget. Retrieved August 2, 2015, from
www.time.com/time/time100/scientist/profile/piaget.html
Patterson, E. (2005). Psyography:Jean Piaget. Retrieved 2015, from
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/mbradley/psyography/jeanpiaget.html

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Smith, L. (2000). A Brief Biography of Jean Piaget. Retrieved August 2, 2015, from Jean Piaget
Society: http://www.piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html
Strauss, C. (2001). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Tryphon, A. (1999). Working with Piaget: Essays in Honour of Barbel Inhelder. Edelstein :
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Veugelers, W. (2011). Education and Humanism: Linking Autonomy and Humanity. New York:
Sense Publisher.
Wiliam, D. (2006). Piaget and Education Primer. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

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