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In 1955 he became a
director of the International Centre for Epistemology at the University of
Geneva, and also he worked as co-director of the International Bureau of
Education.
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1980
Death :During his academic and professional
career, he published an extraordinary number of books and scientific research
papers, not just on child development, but also on education, the history of
thought, philosophy and logic. He continued his prodigious output right up to
his death, wrote more than 50 books and monographs during his long career.
Piaget discovered that the mind of the child evolves through a series of set
stages of adulthood.
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Contemporaries of Piaget who
have shared the respect for children, were John Dewey in United States, Maria
Montessori in Italy and Paulo Freire in Brazil. You may have heard of the
Montessori schools however Piaget’s influence on education is enriched and
deeper in sense as well as pervasive. They all fought for changes in teaching
methodology.
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Piaget has been adored by
generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty
vessels to be filled with knowledge as traditional pedagogical theory had put
forth, but they are active builders of knowledge. Children are the little scientists.
They are constantly creating and testing their own world of life.
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Although, Piaget devoted
over half a century to his psychological research in new area of
psycholinguistics, his basic ideas appear within the first decade of his
research. He stimulated considerable experimental research in cognition and
child language development, which provoked criticism throughout the world.
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Jean Piaget’s contribution
is known all over the world and is still an inspiration in fields like
psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law as
witnessed in the annual catalogues of the Jean Piaget Archives. Jean Piaget
was still researching, at the age of eighty-four, at the time of his death in
Geneva on September 17, 1980.
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Shortly after Piaget’s
death, John Flavell, a leading Piagetian scholar, described what we owe
Piaget:
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Firstly we owe him a host of
insightful concepts of enduring power and fascination… concepts of object
permanence, conservation, assimilation, accommodation, and Decentration.
Second, we owe him a vast conceptual framework that has highlighted key
issues and problems in human cognitive development. This framework is the
now-familiar vision of the developing child, who, through its own active and
creative commerce with its environment, builds an orderly succession of
cognitive structures en route to intellectual maturity. These two debts add
up to a third, more general one: We owe him the present field of cognitive
development…Our task is not to extend and go beyond what he began so well.
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