Author, Bruce Lerro, Co-Founder and Co-Organizer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism
Why Communists Should Respect the Work of Jean Piaget
Synthesizing biology and philosophy
Without a doubt Jean Piaget is one of the greatest Western psychologists of the 20th century. By training as a biologist, he synthesized biology with his love of philosophy through the practical work of understanding human development over the life span. Piaget must have been in heaven as he got a chance to apply Kant's categorizes of thought to how children navigated the world. He found that children's sense of time, space, causality, chance, and numbers changed qualitatively as they got older. As children answered his questions, he found he could group their answers into 4 phases of development. Their thinking moved from the simple and homogeneous to complex and heterogeneous.
Stages of intelligence
- The sensory motor stage based on what Piaget characterized as body-action intelligence that occurred from birth to two years of age.
- The preoperational stage which occurred roughly from the age of 2-7. This might be called body-action-mind intelligence.
- The concrete operations phase covered the ages of 7 to 11. This can be called mind-body action intelligence.
- The formal operation stage occurred between the ages of 11-15. It was like the mind reflecting on the thinking process itself. It might be called self-reflection.
For Piaget these stages were not automatic. A child or adolescent could get stuck at a stage if something was organically mentally wrong with them. Thinking can also stagnate because of a destabilizing event such as experiencing war or a natural disaster. However, he believed the stages would unfold even in spite of psychological processes like neurosis.
Assimilation and accommodation
But what drives the stages? Piaget argued that just like other biological creatures children are driven to adapt to their environment. They do this by going back and forth between two processes, assimilation and accommodation. We assimilate when we take information from the world and bend it to a shape we can use by "digesting' it in relation to culturally accumulated knowledge or past experience. We accommodate when we take our past experience and bend it to include new information coming from the physical world. What drives us up the stages is that the young child must deal with an increasingly complex environment. As the world becomes more complex the higher stages, concrete and Formal Operations, require more abstract and complex problem-solving skills.
Neither assimilation nor accommodation is a smooth for Piaget. Children can over-assimilate or over-accommodate. We over-assimilate when we hold on too tightly to past knowledge or experience and not let enough of the new world in. This translates as people being stubborn and not learning. The opposite problem occurs when we give in too quickly to new information and cave into that information, abandoning what we have learned from past accumulated knowledge or personal experience.
The dialectical nature of Piaget's framework
Piaget saw the relationship between the child and the world very dialectically. The child has to adapt to their environment and in the process constructs their reaction to the world in a creative way. As the child matures and their thought becomes more complex, they shape reality more actively. Dialectics is also operating in the relationship between assimilation and accommodation. Each feeds the other and together they increasingly shape a more complex intelligence. Lastly, Piaget has his own version of Hegel's qualitative leaps. He claimed his stages were undergoing qualitative leaps. There is an emergent level of a higher stage which can't be reduced to the previous level.
Piaget was anti-reductionist. He insisted that the mind had a real part to play in the evolution of psychology (unlike the behaviorists). Yet he was not an idealist who saw the mind as a passive object of contemplation. Piaget insisted that intelligence can only be determined when the mind swings into action. It was in the process of problem-solving that intelligence was found. Lastly, Piaget was dialectical in his methods. He held clinical interviews with children and conducted experiments with them to determine how they thought. He did not think intelligence could be found in intelligence testing.
Later modifications of Piaget's thinking
Piaget's theories have generally stood the test of time. Recent studies have found that the ordering of the stages still holds, but they found there was more flexibility as to when children entered the stage. Recent research has found that children are smarter and more altruistic than Piaget had proposed. Originally Piaget thought that children around the world went through all four stages. Later evidence shows (both Piaget himself and other researches) that many people in other cultures do not go through formal operational thinking. Then it was found that many adults in Western societies don't reach Formal Operations either.
Communist Criticisms of Piaget's Work
The dialectical nature of Vygotsky's work
Lev Vygotsky was also an anti-reductionist, as demonstrated is his article The Crisis in Psychology, where he criticized both behaviorist and introspectionist theories. Like Piaget he emphasized the importance of action to understand individual maturation processes. The difference is that for Piaget, action was individual action. For Vygotsky action was always social as demonstrated in his stages of cooperative learning. Like Piaget, Vygotsky also used interviews as his method of investigation. He extracted the child's or adolescent's thinking processes through questions and answers. Like Piaget he didn't think much of intelligence testing. But for Vygotsky the first level of higher learning was through what he called the zone of proximal development. In this zone it was in cooperating with other people that intelligence was shown, not in thinking alone.
Underemphasis of micro social life
One of the biggest criticisms of Piaget's genetic epistemology is his under-emphasis on social life. For Piaget intelligence is found primarily through the interaction of the physical word and psychology. Social life was a derivative and a later development in the life of the child. For Vygotsky the foundation of individual development was an immediate initiation into the socio-historical life of humanity. In fact, for Vygotsky the organism does not even become an individual until they have learned the language and tools of a culture. Biological predispositions are secondary if mentioned at all. For Piaget social life is gradually introduced to a child. Piaget doesn't think social life became a force to speak of in individual development until the young child is in the concrete operational stage, at about eight years of age. Vygotsky believed we are social from the start and most immediately with the introduction of tools and language at about the age of two years.
Third, Piaget's idea of social life is relatively impoverished. He thinks of social life as having an audience. In other words, being social requires other people to be present. This seems it imply that when the child is alone, they are not social. Vygotsky would say we have internalized society by the age of two and this socialization lives inside us whether anyone else is there or not. As the child matures, they begin to utilize the tools, not only of his own generation but in the accumulated history of previous generations.
Speaking, spontaneity and play
Piaget believed that coherent thinking can go onto prior learning symbolic abilities. He imagines that the process of learning symbolic forms is a product of thinking. For him, language arises spontaneously as an unfolding of thinking processes. Piaget understoof a child's speech is an original creation and initially does not copy the speech of adults. They only overlap later in development. Furthermore, Piaget's overall sense of children was that they were spontaneously creative and wanted to explore and experiment. Lastly, Piaget also sees play as spontaneous. Let's pretend play is solitary. It has no rules there is no social pressure. Adults should not interfere. Piaget thought children are spontaneously curious and want to explore.
Vygotsky argues that learning language is a precondition for intelligent thinking. In fact, learning to speak acts as a mediator to complete new thinking processes. For Lev, learning language is not a spontaneous product of thought. It is driven by a new means of communication with adults when the young child's gestures are no longer enough. Vygotsky does not think children are so creative as to make up their own speech. The child's speech as soon as he graduates from babbling is a copy of the speech of adults. Vygotsky thought that children were not as curious as Piaget did. He thought that adults had to pose problems in order to make the child curious. The child only becomes curious once what Vygotsky called primary subjectivity is established. For Vygotsky all play is already social. In "let's pretend" play rules may be made up and changed as they go as in the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes when Calvin and Hobbes are playing Calvinball. However, they still have social roles no matter how unstable they may be. Children want to copy adult rules and roles, not escape them and run away.
Stages of thinking and speaking (thought and speech)
Piaget allowed no room for speech in his picture of the developing child. The whole dialectical process was between thinking and physical objects. The thinking process went from autism to egocentric speech to logic. Neither speaking nor school were important. For Vygotsky the child's speaking to adults was the key to thinking. Vygotsky divided social speech into three phases:
- egocentric speech for oneself;
- communication speech for others;
- inner speech. This is where the communication speech with others is internalized so that this social speech at a higher level than egocentric speech for oneself.
For Piaget, egocentric speech disappears once higher concrete and Formal Operations appear. For Vygotsky, egocentric speech does not disappear. It goes back and forth with inner speech. For Piaget a child's speech is an original formation and doesn't initially copy the speech of adults. That comes later. For Vygotsky, after babbling children's speech is an immediate copy of adult speech.
Origins of symbolic thought and social meaning
For Piaget, symbolic thought arises out of the natural maturation of sensory motor operations. Object substitution is a consequence rather than a reason for symbolic thought. For Vygotsky symbolic thought developed as a result of the activity as of object substitution. Symbolic thought occurs in the pivot between objects, much like money becomes the symbolic mediator between one commodity and another It follows that Vygotsky does not think children are naturally curious and what to explore. He thinks adults need to provide leadership to initiate children's curiosity.
How does social meaning arise? For Piaget, infants can gradually discover meaning through their private operations. Vygotsky would say that is this is ridiculous. The social meaning of events can only be discovered by social processes. They result from interactions with adults in cooperative learning situations.
Learning and schooling
Piaget thought that biological maturation preceded learning. Piaget thought the adult has to wait for the biological maturation process to begin for the child before teaching anything. Vygotsky disagreed. He thought learning precedes maturation with instruction leading to development. In other words, the social process of cooperative learning pushes the maturation process itself forward.
What is the impact of the presence of older and younger children on another child's learning? Piaget thought that having the child's peers present is the best way to learn to solve problems. He thought that the presence of older children would have a dampening effect. The younger children would simply conform to the older kids and not use their creativity to solve problems. Vygotsky felt that the older to younger combination actually worked better because the older kids had to learned the material better since they had to teach the younger ones.
Piaget didn't think much of school. He just didn't think it was important to intellectual development. Even in scientific training he thought that the child should first work out the scientific process of experimentation before involvement in any discussion. For Vygotsky schooling was crucial in the development of intelligence. His colleague Alexander Luria researched the transformation of peasants psychologically during the industrial revolution in Russia in the 1920s. He pointed to schooling as crucial in moving peasants to a higher stage of cognitive development. As for learning the sciences, Vygotsky thought Piaget was naà à ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ? à ? ï ? ? ï ? ?ve in thinking that children could work out the scientific method by themselves when they reached the Formal Operational stage. Adults trained in the sciences first had to present methods to adolescent Formal Operations to adolescence to complete and expand the stage.
Philosophical differences
Piaget's biggest influences were Coleridge, Kant and Ernst Mach. From Coleridge and Kant he built up an appreciation of the inner world. For Coleridge it was imagination and for Kant the categories of thought. This affected the way he proceeded to understand development. Piaget begins with the inner world, proceeds to the outer. The outer worlds were treated as a prop occasion, a scene for operational thinking. He saw change happening in the individual from the inside out (endogenous). As a Kantian, the outer world was things-in-themselves which we can never know, (Mach agreed with this) so why bother paying much attention to it?
Vygotsky's influences were Spinoza, Hegel and Marx. All three were more interested in the external world because they all thought reality can be known. For both Hegel and Marx, the outer world is transformable. The transformation of the outer world is what makes humanity possible at the macrolevel which is then filtered down to the micro level of the individual. For Vygotsky the movement of learning begins with the outer, moves to the inner and then moves back to the outer as the outer world is transformed. Vygotsky's process generally moves exogenously from the outside in.
The place and misplace of contradiction in individual development
For Marxists, the words "is" and "am" should be stricken from the dictionary. Why?
Because both words are reifications of processes that are already going on and never stop going on. All processes have a shape and a set of constraints. Processes can be conflicted and sometimes lead to crisis. But are these conflicts and crisis inevitable or can they be short-circuited? For Piaget and many others conflicts and crisis are real, but there are no contradictions. Like many philosophers, Piaget thinks that contradictions are in the minds of people, due to logical thinking fallacies and can be corrected by Formal Operational deductive logic. We Marxists say contradictions are not just the result of faulty reasoning processes. Contradictions are in the world.
In one of his books, Klaus Riegel argues that there are four dimensions of interdependent developmental progression:
- inner biological - infections, illnesses, epidemics
- individual psychological - disorder, disorientation, psychotic breaks
- cultural socialization - adaptation, acculturation, class struggle, revolution
- outer physical - extreme weather, natural disasters, asteroid impact, sun burning up
For Riegel, from the time an organism is formed these four dimensions are conflicted, they sometimes lead to crisis but fundamentally they contradict each other. For example, there will always be a contradiction between Darwinian sexual selection strategies and human moral codes that require long-term planning. So too, individual psychological processes such as living in the here-and-now will be contradicted by social processes such as class loyalty (to a union, for example) that might demand the individual repress an immediate desire for more money. So too, the social organization which pressures us to get the most of out of our technology with the least amount of effort will contradict ecological pollution and the extinction of species. In all these cases there will be conflict, crisis and temporary resolutions but the contradictions remain. It is the presence of contradictions that drives individual and social creativity.
As a biologist Piaget would recognize that biological constraints will definitely impact individual development. His four stages are the developmental process by which an individual becomes a biological-psychological being. He might see conflict and crisis operating in his descriptions of assimilation and accommodation. However, by the time the child or adolescent reaches the operational stages, conflicts and crisis grow less. He would never consider those tensions contradictions. So far as I know Piaget never mentions any conflict, crisis, let alone contradictions between the individual-psychological and cultural socialization. Piaget does not mention conflict or contradictions between cultural socialization and the outer physical environment. As a Kantian with sympathies toward Ernst Mach the cultural-physical world is of little interest to him.
Macrosocial Criticisms of Piaget
How does social class impact stages of development
I am not an expert on Piaget but have a never seen any references to how social class might affect his stages. Since he claimed his stages are universal, this implies that an upper middle-class lawyer, middle-class teacher and a forklift driver in a plant would all go through all four stages. While Vygotsky did not write about the impact of social class on stages of development, as a Marxist I am confident that he would have agreed that social class does impact the stage of development achieved. These stages of development are impacted by the proportion of the body to the mind in the work done. Lawyers makes their living mostly with their mind. The characteristics of formal operational thinking dovetails beautifully with the work activities of lawyers. Lawyers have to self-reflect, decide on which kind of case they want to present and develop rhetorical strategies to influence the jury. Similarly, a college teacher must decide on books, plan weekly topics and decide how to implement small group work. The mind in both kinds of work is more important than the body.
But with working class jobs like driving a fork lift, it is not necessary to plan, supervise or self-reflect. What is important is the body is in shape and they can drive a stick shift. Learning Formal Operations is not necessary. This does not mean working class people will not play chess or be interested in trigonometry. It is just that this is not required for their job. Since work dominates our lives most workers will not develop Formal Operational thinking. Because workers are roughly 40% of the population two thirds of the population are not likely to learn Formal Operations.
Are Piaget's stages universally applicable to tribal, agricultural and industrial societies
Piaget and his students seemed to think so. But anthropologist C.R. Hallpike has written a series of books arguing that Piaget's stages emerge at different points in history. In his book Foundations of Primitive Thought Hallpike argues that people in the tribal societies he studied achieved a sophisticated version of pre-operational thinking. He also argued that full Formal Operational thinking only emerged in 17th century Europe. Though Vygotsky developed different stages of cognitive development than Piaget, Vygotsky and the sociohistorical school would agree with Hallpike that the stages of cognitive development are not universal but are emergent products of history. In anthropology, cultural relativists are scandalized by Hallpike and Vygotsky's contention because they think it implies that tribal people are not as smart as people living in industrial societies. Property understood, this is not what they claim. I completely support Hallpike and Vygotsky (and Luria's) claim. In two chapters of my book Lucifer's Labyrinth I argue that a sophisticated form of concrete operations emerged in between the 1500-1700 CE and that Formal Operations emerged in the 17th century with the emergence of statistical reasoning, scientific method and the emergence of capitalism.
Are there stages beyond Formal Operations?
Piaget never proposed any stages beyond Formal Operations. Strangely, he claimed Formal Operations first appeared between the ages of 11 and 15 and then there is no further intellectual development in people. So, according to this, if the average person in the West lives to be 75, for 60 years there is no intellectual development beyond when they are 11 to 15 years of age. Marxist psychologist Klaus Riegel proposed there was a 5th stage of cognitive development which he called "dialectical operations". Michael Basseches did some research to support dialectical thinking as a fifth stage of cognitive development in Dialectical Thinking in Adult Development. More recently Otto Laske has also argued for a fifth stage. Dialectical Thinking for Integral Leaders: A Primer
Please see my article Spirals of Becoming: The Search for a Dialectical Spiral in the Individual Life Cycle for much more detail about Piaget's stages and Michael Basseches' research on dialectical operations.
See my table which summarizes the differences between Piaget and Vygotsky
Conclusion: Why We Need Vygotsky's Socio-Historical Psychology for 21st Century Socialism
In my previous article Building Bridges Between Vygotsky and Marx, I mentioned the three phases of cooperative learning. In 21st century socialist societies, these stages can be applied to workers in worker cooperatives learning the processes of deciding what to produce, how to produce it, how to manage the scale of production and how to compensate themselves without using money. This will require learning to think dialectically using a 5th stage of cognitive development beyond Formal Operations. Cooperative learning and dialectical thinking will be required in worker participation in centralized state planning projects.
Cooperative learning and dialectical operations would be active in school group learning processes under socialism. The same could be said in stimulating child development among parents and in children learning to play, in both "let's pretend" play and organized games. Furthermore, individual development would undergo a qualitative leap in which people would craft a life mission for themselves under socialism. Lastly, today dialectical thinking would be essential for understanding the contradictions of world capitalism, its current crisis on both domestic and international levels. It would be required in understanding the nature of imperialism and the geopolitical struggles between the West and BRICS while being both sympathetic to and critical of the new world being forged by China, Russia and Iran
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