Jean Piaget: The Man and His Ideas

Jean Piaget, although internationally acclaimed for his revolutionary ideas about human intellectual development and how children learn, has been misunderstood by many of those attempting to interpret his theories and apply them. Fortunately, this dialogue between Dr. Evans and Piaget. the famed psychologist is given the opportunity to clarify his theories and make them understandable to those without specialized training. The dialogue section of the book, translated by Eleanor Duckworth, not only presents these theories in straightforward fashion, including a discussion of Piaget's brilliant analysis of stages in intellectual growth, but tells how Piaget arrives at his ideas. Piaget describes an early encounter with Freud and his views on Gestalt psychology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, Erikson's work, and that of B. F. Skinner, Noam Chomsky, and Jerome Bruner. Other highlights of the dialogue are his reaction to his critics and his assessment of intelligence testing and Arthur Jensen's controversial concepts of intelligence. In addition to the dialogue, the book contains an introduction, Measuring Young Minds, by David Elkind, a summary of Piaget's theories of the developing individual by Dr. Evans, William Krossner, and Harvey Ginsburg, an autobiography and an important essay, Genetic Epistemology by Jean Piaget. Altogether, the dialogue plus the accompanying pieces provide the student and general reader with a clear and accurate understanding of the work of one of the century's most important psychologists