Piaget's Legacy

Although the article was completely one sided (as the author states in the opening paragraph) I found it to be an article giving well deserved acclaim to one of the fields most important theorists. With his cognitive development theories, Jean Piaget transformed the field of developmental psychology, and laid the groundwork necessary for current and future researchers to expand on his theories. He challenged the blank slate theory with his four major stages of development, and broke down each stage to explain how he thought kids thought and were able to acquire knowledge through the curiosity and exploration of their world. At the time, this ideology was somewhat hard to swallow for many because it deviated from the common theories then that children can be sort of molded for "programmed" into whatever adults wanted them to be. Piaget insisted children learned intrinsically, from what they could deduce about their world, not extrinsically, like the blank slate theory suggests. Piaget's theories have been criticized, and he probably wasn't right about everything, but his influence on the field of developmental psychology cannot be denied, as we can all attest to by spending a prodigious amount of class time studying his stages of cognitive development.