The development of the language and thought of the child was first subjected to a rigorous analysis in the pioneering work of the Swiss epistemologist Jean Piaget. Some aspects of his theories have been questioned, especially the lack of flexibility with which he interpreted the way children move from one to another of his stages. Nevertheless, this was pioneering work, in a field that had been virtually ignored, and many of his theories retain considerable validity. Piaget was the first one to give an idea of the dialectical process of the development from birth, through childhood to adolescence, as Hegel was the first to provide a systematic exposition of dialectical thinking in general. The defects of both systems should not be allowed to obscure the positive content of their work. Although Piaget’s stages are undoubtedly rather schematic, and his research methods open to question, they nevertheless retain value as a general over-view of early human development.

Piaget’s theories were a reaction against the views of the behaviourists, whose leading representative, American psychologist Burrhus F. Skinner, was particularly influential in the 1960s in the USA. The behaviourist approach is completely mechanistic, based on a linear pattern of cumulative development. According to this, children learn most efficiently when they are subjected to a linear programme of material devised by expert teachers and curriculum planners. Skinner’s educational theories fit in very well with the capitalist mentality. Children will only learn, according to this theory, if they are rewarded for doing so, just as a worker who gets extra pay for overtime.

The behaviourists adopted a typically mechanical position on the development of language. Noam Chomsky pointed out that Skinner adequately described how a baby learned the first few words (mainly nouns), but he did not however explain how these were put together. Language is not just a string of words. It is precisely the combination of the words in a certain dynamic relationship that makes language such a rich, effective, flexible and complex instrument. Here, most decidedly, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It is really an incredible feat for a child of two to learn the rules of grammar, as any adult who has tried to learn a foreign language will agree.

Compared to this crude and mechanistic dogma, Piaget’s theories represented a great step forward. Piaget explained that learning comes naturally to children. It is the job of the teacher to bring out those tendencies which are already present in all children. Moreover, Piaget correctly pointed out that the process of learning is not a straight line, but is punctuated by qualitative breakthroughs. Although Piaget’s original stages are open to question, there is no doubt that this dialectical approach, in general, was valid. What was valuable in Piaget’s work was that the development of the child was presented as a contradictory process in which each stage was based on the previous one, both overcoming and preserving it. The genetically conditioned base provides the ready-made material, which from the first moment enters into a dialectical interaction with the environment. The newborn baby is not conscious, but driven by deep-rooted biological instincts that urgently demand satisfaction. These powerful animal instincts do not disappear, but remain as an unconscious substratum, underlying our activities.

To use the language of Hegel, what we have here is the transition from being-in-itself to being-for-itself – from potential to actual, from an isolated, helpless, unconscious being, a plaything of natural forces to a conscious human being. The movement towards self-consciousness, as Piaget correctly explained, is a struggle, which passes through different phases. The newborn baby does not clearly distinguish itself from its surroundings. Only slowly does it become aware of the distinction between the self and the external world. “The period from birth to the acquisition of language,” writes Piaget, “is marked by an extraordinary mental development.” Elsewhere, he describes the first 18 months of existence as “a Copernican revolution on a small scale.”[63] The key to this process is the gradual dawning of the realisation of the relation between the subject (self) and the object (reality), which must be understood.

  1. Piaget, J. The Mental Development of the Child, p. 19.