Jean Piaget

The following is the translation of a speech made by Swiss Developmental Psychologist Jean Piaget. I'll try to post the title of the movie I got it from later.

     "We classify education into two main categories: passive education, relying primarily on memory, and active education, relying on intelligent understanding and discovery. Our real problem is-what is the goal of education? Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what I already know? Or ... should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool are on, throughout life?
     Since we cannot distinguish 'true' from 'false' by the content of memory, it follows that every memory contains an element of reconstruction of the past. The activity of memory is usually presented in terms of code: coding and de-coding. When an event is perceived, just as I perceive this auditorium, a number of perceptions are recorded in code form. Later on, when I think of you in my memory, there is a de-coding.
     The code permits us to organize a memory, from the moment it is recorded until it is evoked. Dr. Inhelder and I posed this problem: is the code of memory invariant? Is it the same at all ages -the same for preschool children as for 10-15 year olds? Or does the code itself change? Our hypothesis is that the code of memory depends on intelligence-on the child's operational level. The code changes from one level to another. It improves, becomes more structured, according to the progress of the child's intelligence."