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.
The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation.
The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.
The self thus becomes aware of itself, at least in its practical action, and discovers itself as a cause among other causes and as an object subject to the same laws as other objects.
Play is the work of childhood.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
Play is the answer to the question, 'How does anything new come about?'
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.
Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next.
Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.
Childish egocentrism is, in its essence, an inability to differentiate between the ego and the social environment.
During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.
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.
In genetic epistemology, as in developmental psychology, too, there is never an absolute beginning.
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
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.
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.
With regard to moral rules, the child submits more or less completely in intention to the rules laid down for him, but these, remaining, as it were, external to the subject's conscience, do not really transform his conduct.
To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active.
