Play is the work of childhood.
Children require long, uninterrupted periods of play and exploration.
Teaching means creating situations where structures can be discovered.
What is desired is that the teacher cease being a lecturer, satisfied with transmitting ready-made solutions. His role should rather be that of a mentor stimulating initiative and research.
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
Experience precedes understanding.
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.
We learn more when we are compelled to invent.
True interest appears when the self identifies itself with ideas or objects, when it finds in them a means of expression and they become a necessary form of fuel for its activity.
It is with children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, mathematical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth.
The more we try to improve our schools, the heavier the teaching task becomes; and the better our teaching methods the more difficult they are to apply.
Each time one prematurely teaches a child something he could have discovered himself, that child is kept from inventing it and consequently from understanding it completely.
I am convinced that there is no sort of boundary between the living and the mental or between the biological and the psychological. From the moment an organism takes account of a previous experience and adapts to a new situation, that very much resembles psychology.
The child who defines a lie as being a “naughty word” knows perfectly well that lying consists in not speaking the truth. He is not, therefore, mistaking one thing for another, he is simply identifying them one with another by what seems to us a quaint extension of the word “lie”.
Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.
Only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual.
To understand is to invent.
This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge.
Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process.
Logic and mathematics are nothing but specialised linguistic structures.