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Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.
Jean Piaget
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Children learn best through their own discoveries and experiences, rather than being taught too quickly.

Jean Piaget emphasizes the importance of allowing children to explore and create their own understanding of the world. When adults rush in to teach concepts too quickly, they may hinder the child's ability to grasp and internalize those ideas through their own ingenuity. The process of invention is crucial for deeper learning, as it enables children to connect personally with the knowledge they acquire.

Themes

ChildrenUnderstandingLearningEducationCreativity

In practice

Example use cases

Using this quote in a parent-teacher conference to discuss the importance of allowing children to experiment in their learning process.

More from Jean Piaget

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.
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Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own.
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Everyone knows that at the age of 11-12, children have a marked impulse to form themselves into groups and that the respect paid to the rules and regulations of their play constitutes an important feature of this social life.
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Play is the work of childhood.
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The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things.
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Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists
Jean PiagetRead

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