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EDUCATIONALTHEORY
Summer 1988, Vol. 38, No. 3
0 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Piaget’s Clay and Descartes’ Wax
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By David W. Jardine
INTRODUCTION
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In the common parlance of Early Childhood Education, children are active learners.
They learn and develop by actively engaging the world, manipulating it, handling it,
constructing their own understanding of it in relation to the activities they perform.
Each act is taken, quite literally, to be a “making sense” of the world. Knowledge is
seen as a construction of meaning; humans are conceived as “meaning makers.” On
a certain level, this common parlance is beyond doubt. Children learn, grow, and
develop by manipulating objects, and in young children, understanding is action. And,
as a teacher responsible for the education of children, I should provide educationally
appropriate materials for such manipulation.
Raising questions about this picture of pedagogy is difficult to do, because it links
up, in intimate and often unvoiced ways, with social and cultural presuppositions whose
roots extend deeply into Western philosophical traditions and images of the place and
function of humanity in the world. It has become commonplace in Western culture to
see the world as very little more than a passive, malleable resource for our actions or
as the product of those actions. The language of education, especially that language
rooted in the work of Jean Piaget, embodies elements of this picture of the world. The
developing child is conceived as an active being whose interactions with the world are
acts of “construction.” In this view, the world is conceived as the constructive “outcome”
of such interactions. The world is something to which we do things, a forum for our
concerted action. The world gains its meaning only vis-a-vis the structures that the
subject can wield to confer meaning on the world. Becoming educated is a matter of
developing those structures which ensure that we can act in concert with others in
such a conferral of meaning. In Piagetian theory, it means constructing an understanding
of the world in light of the “concepts and categories of established science.”’
This paper arises out of a vague uneasiness with the notion of understanding as
construction and action and the images of mastery, domination, and control that this
notion produces. Such images not only emerge in our picture of how children understand
the world; they also have come, in some circles, to inform our understanding of the
nature of pedagogy itself. The pedagogical act has come to be seen as something we
must strategically dominate, manipulate, and control in order to ensure the education
of the child (and, of course, to ensure the accountability of the teacher).
It is perhaps inevitable that we would desire to secure, control, and master the
path to adulthood for our children, by whatever means possible. As a parent of a fiveyear-old child, I understand this desire most deeply. 1 want my child to become all that
he can become, and I (sometimes desperately) want to have a hand in this becoming,
to stay the course he takes, to secure his way. However, as an expression of this
desire, I have yet to ask clearly how and to what extent I wish to engender‘ in him an
Correspondence: Department of Teacher Education and Supervision, Faculty of Education, The
University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2N 1N4.
1 . Barbel Inhelder, “Some Aspects of Piaget’s Genetic Approach to Cognition,” in Piaget and
Knowledge: Theoretical Foundations, ed. Hans Furth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969),
23.
2. I am using this word with the intent of simply noting the issue of the gender-specific
character of notions of mastery, control, and dominance as particularly masculine images of
knowledge and Understanding.
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image of understanding as a matter of the constructive and manipulative mastery and
control of the world, himself, and others. In the end, I want my child to live a life of
his own, a life which goes beyond my mastery and control, both as a parent and as
an educator. But more than this, I want to engender in him the possibility of understanding
the world, himself, and other people, not as a matter of mastery and control, but as a
matter of a sensitive and open engagement with what is “other.” I want him to be open
to what goes beyond his own constructions, not because he is forced to do so (as if
what is “other” is inevitably a threat or an enemy of his own constructions, demanding
accommodation), but in order to preserve what is other as an essential moment in his
own self-understanding.
In such an expression of what I hope for my child is an image of pedagogy which
does not wish to banish notions of mastery and control as forms of understanding or
as goals of education. Rather, mastery and control remain possible but not always and
everywhere necessary forms of Being-in-the-world. It is beyond question that children
come to understand the world by actively manipulating it, mastering it, controlling it,
and such activities surely have a place, both in our lives and in the lives of our children.
However, as educators who are responsible for what children might become, we must
ask: What end does this picture of understanding serve? What relationship between
the world and being human does this picture engender in the children we teach? In
the end, do we want children to become merely manipulative? Do we wish to engender
acting without reservation, action held in reserve only when it meets those resistances
which, to use Piagetian terminology, force it to accommodate them? Do we wish to
engender the belief that understanding involves a progressive “conquest of things’I3
and that the world exists only insofar as it is compatible with those methods that wish
to conquer it progressively? Even though, given the work of Piaget, this may be what
we know children to be, we must face the fact that “all knowledge is nothing more
than what we have learned to live with.’’4 We must therefore raise the hermeneutic
question as to how we have come to live with this picture of pedagogy and what such
a picture means for the life we live together with our ~ h i l d r e n . ~
What follows is simply one thread of this immensely complex issue. It begins by
detailing an almost playful coincidence between the work of Rene Descartes and the
work of Jean Piaget, in an attempt to explore one aspect of the origins of our
contemporary pedagogical conception of understanding as an active construction of
reality. This coincidence is fleshed out with an interpretation of lmmanuel Kant’s
Copernican Revolution. The concluding section is an exploration of some of the images
that coalesce around this conception and a reflection on how we might come to give
a voice to an alternative to this conception.
DESCARTES’
WAX
Through the process of methodical doubt, Rene Descartes came upon the cogito
as that which resists such doubt, as that which is thought with such clarity and
distinctness that doubting it is no longer possible. From such a footing, the nature of
material objects becomes the focus of inquiry in the Second Meditationof his Meditations
on first Philosophy:
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3. Jean Piaget. Origins of lntelligence in Children (New York: International Universities Press,
1952), 363.
4. Dieter Misgeld. David W. Jardine, and Peter R. Grahame, “Communicative Competence,
Practical Reasoning, and the Understanding of Culture,” Phenomenology
Pedagogy 3 , no. 3
(1985): 203.
5. I wish to express my indebtedness to two papers by Dr. David G. Smith, University of
Lethbridge. “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: Facing Pedagogy in the Nuclear Shadow” (presented
at the Fifth Triennial World Conference on Education, Hiroshima, Japan, July-August, 1986), and
“Children and the Gods of War” (forthcoming in the Journal of Educational Thought, 1988); both
demonstrate in sensitive and powerful ways why the question of how we might live our lives
together with children is the fundamental question of pedagogy.
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Let us take for example, this piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly
from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey which it
contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it
has been culled; its colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold,
easily handled, and if you strike it with the finger, it will emit a sound. Finally
all the things which are requisite to cause us distinctly to recognize it as a
body, are met within it. But notice.. . .6
From here, Descartes goes on to detail the changes that the wax undergoes as it
approaches his fire: its odor, its color, figure, size, and shape are changed. It is no
longer hard, cold, or easily handled, and it will no longer emit a sound when struck.
In the face of such phenomenalistic changes, Descartes asks, “Does the same
wax remain?”’ His initial answer is striking in its commonplaceness: “We must confess
that it remains; none would judge it otherwise.”8 But what is this “it” that remains? “It
could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these
things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing, are found to be changed,
and yet the same wax remains.”’
What is it about the material world that resists change, that persists against
methodical doubt, that can be recognized with clarity and distinctness?
Magnitude, or extension in length, breadth, or depth, I do so perceive; also
figure which results from a terminating of this extension, the situation which
bodies of different figure in relation to one another, and movement or change
of situation; to which we may also add substance, duration and number. As
to other things such as light, colour, sounds, scents, tastes, heat, cold and
the other tactile qualities, they are thought by me with so much confusion that
I do not even know if they are true or false, i.e.. whether the ideas which I
form of these qualities are actually ideas of real objects or not.lo
“All which I know clearly and distinctly as pertaining to this object does really belong
to it.”” And what so pertains is, in the end, this piece of wax insofar as it is the object
of logico-mathematical, scientific discourse, for as such an object, this piece of wax
can be thought with clarity and distinctness.
INTERLUDE
We must not ignore a central concern of Descartes’ work. What is it that guarantees
that the clarity and distinctness of ideas about an object “really belong to it”? Descartes’
work stands at a fundamental turning point of inquiry coincident with the advent of
modern science: the emergence of the subject as a fundamental moment, one might
say, a fundamental problem, of understanding the world and what really belongs to it.
The task that faced Descartes is one that displays a hesitancy about reason and its
ability to take its own clarity and distinctness as foundational. In spite of such clarity,
Descartes is compelled to ask how it is that the subject and the ideas it thinks with
clarity and distinctness are related to objects themselves, objects independent of the
subject. Descartes was not able to rest with the cogito (and those ideas which share
in its indubitability) as a fundamental. Rather, the self-evidence of the subject becomes
precisely the problem of inquiry. In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, it is God
who secures the subject’s ability to transcend itself and understand the world.” Because
of Descartes’ hesitancy, the ideas of reason fail, in a peculiar way, to form a self-
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6. Rene Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in Descartes Selections, ed. R. M.
Eaton (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), 102.
7. Ibid., 103.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 116.
11. Ibid., 139.
12. Cf. Ibid., Meditation V.
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enclosed, self-referential system. Reason still longs for its own transcendence and
avoids the pretense of maintaining that such transcendence can be accomplished due
to reason itself. Reason still requires an “other” in order to understand itself and its
own nature and limits.
THECOPERNICAN
REVOLUTION
A light broke upon the students of nature. They learned that reason has insight
only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not
allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading-strings, but must itself
show the way with principles of judgement based upon fixed laws, constraining
nature to give answer to questions of reason’s own d~termining.’~
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Accordingly, the spontaneity of understanding becomes the formative principle
of receptive matter, and in one stroke we have the old mythology of an intellect
which glues and rigs together the world’s matter with its own f0rms.l4
lmmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason turns away from the question of what
“really belongs” to objects independent of the subject and turns to the question of the
essential characteristics of reason itself. To the extent that nature gives answer to
questions of reason’s own determining, it is reason that determines nature as experienced by the subject. Kant is no longer concerned with how it may be that reason can
transcend its own questions and come upon that which transcends its constructions.
In order to preserve God, freedom, and immortality from the hubris of reason, Kant
provided a critique of reason which intended to demonstrate that reason cannot come
upon that which is other than its own determination. Knowledge is possible only insofar
as the categories of reason are applied to the sensible manifold. And the sensible
manifold itself is enformed by the subject through the forms of intuition: space and
time. The categories of reason “really belong” to the phenomenal world, since it is
through the application of such categories to the sensible manifold that the phenomenal
world is constituted as an object of knowledge: “The a priori conditions of a possible
experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of
e~perience.”’~
Without the enforming activity of the subject, all that the world gives
itself to be is a chaos of sensory data. It is the activity of the subject which constitutes
this chaos into a cosmos. Kant’s work thus revolves around a fundamental distinction
between the world “in itself” and the world insofar as it is enformed by the subject.
The world “in itself” and what “really belongs” to it become nothing more than limiting
ideas which we can think without contradiction, but which we can never know.16
Independent of their application to sensory experience, the categories of pure
reason are nothing other than the analytic a priori of formal logic. In their application
to the sensory manifold, formal logic becomes a transcendental logic, i.e., a logic
whereby the subject transcends itself and comes to understand, not objects in
themselves, but objects insofar as they are enformed by that act of self-transcendence.
There is thus a peculiarity in this notion of self-transcendence. In the act of understanding
some object in the world, the subject comes to transcend itself; but in the act of such
self-transcendence, the object is enformed by the subject’s activity. The subject thus
can come to know essential features of an object which transcends it only insofar as
the subject finds, in a sense, what it has already placed there. The analytic a priori of
logic thus becomes the synthetic a priori of our knowledge of the world, i.e., the
universal and necessary forms whereby experience is synthesized. For example, the
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13. lmmanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1964),
20. Bxiii.
14. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana
Universities Press, 1985), 70.
15. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 138, A1 11.
16. Ibid., 272, A255-56.
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hypothetical judgment in formal logic (if A then B) becomes, in transcendental logic, an
a priori condition of all possible experience: all events have a cause. We may not know
the cause of a particular event in our experience (this is a matter of empirical experience),
but we know, a priori, that it has a cause, since this is an essential condition of the
possibility of experience itself and therefore an essential form of all objects of experience.
With the Kantian Copernican Revolution, we thus have the opposite movement to
that of the discoveries of Copernicus: Copernicus displaced humanity from the center
of the universe, and Kant’s epistemological revolution re-placed humanity at the center
by making nature answerable to questions of reason’s own determining. In such a
revolution, nature “in itself“ may be preserved from the hubris of reason. But as a
correlative to such preservation, the phenomenal world becomes a closed system
which has reason as its master, as that to which this system is answerable. Therefore,
the task of scientific knowledge is clearly not to ask after that which might transcend
such a closed system. It is not to ask after that which might go beyond its own
methodical constructions, which might bring up short its own pretensions to mastery
and control. Rather, the task of scientific knowledge is to master and control nature,
since it is precisely the terms of such mastery (the categories of reason in their
application to sensory experience) which constitute nature in the first place. That which
transcends such terms of mastery is henceforth banished to the realm of faith or the
idiosyncrasies of subjectivity.
In a peculiar sense, then, mastering nature becomes a form of self-mastery. As
long as the human subject can master itself by adhering to the logico-mathematical
core of reason - as long as the human subject remains an “epistemic subject” - it
remains at the center of nature, because it remains at the center of the questioning to
which nature is answerable. Through such adherence, we gain mastery and control
over what is as a whole, since we gain mastery over those epistemic conditions which
make what is possible at all. And through such adherence, we step decisively into the
age of the monologue of scientific discourse.” Such discourse is a monologue in two
senses: first, every human subject’s voice must speak with the common voice of
science if it is to understand the world, since that world is constituted by the categories
of such a common voice. Science becomes the repository of the “true.” Second, this
singular voice can hear no other voice. It is answerable only to itself, to its own inner
necessity. It cannot attend to that which goes beyond its own questions since, in its
methodical advance, it is precisely those questions which provide the setting in which
the world is brought forth “in truth”:
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Man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set
itself forth, must present itself. Man becomes the representative of that which
is. What is decisive is that man expressly takes up this position as one
constituted by himself. . . and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for
a possible development of humanity. There begins that way of being human
which means the realm of human capacity as a domain given over to measuring
and executing, for the purposes of gaining mastery over what is as a whole.’8
CLAY
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Though tangible matter provides motivity with its reference points and signals,
the latter provides it with its structures. Sense data are meaningless unless
they are assimilated to repeated action^.'^
Piaget’s work emerges out of the Kantian spirit, but, as he notes, the structures
of logico-mathematical knowledge that are fundamental to his theory as the telos of
17. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971).
18. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology,
trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 132.
19. Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child‘s Construction of Quantities,trans. A. Pomerans
(London: Routledge 8 Kegan Paul, 1972), 279.
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development are the terminus ad quem (the point to which) rather than the terminus a
quo (the point from which) knowledge emerges.’’ The “a priori only appears in the
form of essential structures at the end of the evolution of concepts and not at their
beginning.”” And the evolution of the structural a priori of intelligence is due to the
sequential adaptation of the structures of organism-environment interactions to the
“functional a priorj” or the “functional invariants”“ that characterize those interactions:
the functional processes of accommodation, assimilation, and equilibration. And:
It is apparent that this invariant will orient the whole of the successive structures
which the mind will then work out in its contact with reality. It will thus play
the role that philosophers assigned to the a priori; that is to say. it will impose
on the structures certain necessary and irreducible conditions. Only the mistake
has sometimes been made of regarding the a priori as consisting in structures
existing ready-made from the beginning of development, whereas if the
functional invariant of thought is at work in the most primitive stages, it is Only
little by little that it impresses itself on consciousness due to the elaboration
of structures which are increasingly adapted to the function itself.23
The last part of this passage is the most telling: it is the functional activities of the
subject, not precisely the structures the subject wields in such activity, which constitute
the core of Piaget’s work. It is these activities or functions which orient the sequential
emergence of the structures that are characteristic of each level of development. In
fact, Piaget maintains that “[structures] have always seems to us to be . . . the products
of a continuous activity which is immanent in them and of which they constitute the
sequential moments of crystallization.”24
The structures peculiar to logico-mathematical knowledge form a “higher” level of
development in Piagetian theory, not precisely because they are best adapted to some
“reality” considered independent of the subject’s activity, but because they are best
adapted to the process of adapting itself, best adapted to the “function itself.” With the
structures peculiar to logico-mathematical knowledge the functional or operational
character of the organism’s interactions with the world are made fully explicit: in
scientific discourse, the structures whereby we operate on the world are understood
explicitly as ways of operating on the world. This is why the stage of logico-mathematical
knowledge in Piagetian theory is characterized as a stage of logico-mathematical
operations. At the level of logico-mathematical knowledge, we are dealing with “a
closed operational
We are dealing, in the end, with the methods of science.
And, as a method, science can lay out in advance procedures for dealing with the
disruption of the equilibrium it has achieved. It prepares for such disruption by laying
out hypotheses which it can test, such that the potential failure of the hypothesis is
already a feature of the procedure of laying it out. It can therefore methodically anticipate
the inevitable and ongoing process of adaptation.26In this way, it forms a “more
inclusive and more stable”’’ form of equilibrium than “lower” stages, since it actively
anticipates the possible disruption of that equilibrium. This allows Piaget to avoid the
pretense of saying that the current state of scientific knowledge “encompasses the
whole of reality,”28 while also saying that the process of advancing that state of
knowledge (the objective methods of scientific discourse) accomplishes such encompassing by encompassing the functional conditions under which structural change is
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
2, no. 3
27.
28.
Jean Piaget, lnsighfs and ///usionsof Philosophy (New York: Meridian Books, 1970), 57.
Piaget, Origins of lntelligence in Children, 3.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 3.
Ibid., 388.
Piaget and Inhelder, The Child’s Consfrucfion, 278.
Cf. David W. Jardine, “The Piagetian Picture of the World,” Phenomenology + Pedagogy
(1984): 224-35.
Jean Piaget, Psychology of lntelligence (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1973), 7.
Ibid.. 9.
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possible. Scientific method is thus “an exrension and perfection of all adaptive processes”29
because it crystallizes into an objective methodology precisely the functional a priori
of those processes.
In Piaget’s genetic epistemology, then, reality becomes answerable to the a priori
functioning of the subject, and it is so answerable at each level of development. The
peculiarity of the structures characteristic of scientific discourse is not simply that they
make reality answerable to such structures (it shares this in common with all of the
functionings of the organism), but that those structures are explicitly articulated to the
process of making reality so answerable. It is for this reason that Piaget maintains that
“the progress of reason doubtless consists in an increasingly advanced awareness of
the organizing activity inherent in life itself.”30For Piaget, scientific method is a pure
expression of the organizing activity inherent in life itself. And, insofar as this organizing
activity is that in terms of which reality is organized, scientific method is precisely that
which best expresses the nature of reality. And also, as with Kant, to the extent that
one adheres to the organizing activity requisite of scientific discourse, one adheres to
the nature of the real by adhering to that discourse which essentially constitutes the
real. It is little wonder, then, that Piaget maintains that “the sciences are self-sufficient
and alone guarantee their own refle~tion.”~’
Calling upon anything else for that guarantee
or that sufficiency would entail turning away from the life out of which science emerges
and in which science appears as the extension and perfection of that life. There is
thus an “inner necessity” to science, an “intrinsic intelligibility.”32In its careful and
breathtaking advance, it has secured its understanding of the world in methods which
can envisage alternatives to such methods only as a breach of this
It is against this background that a peculiar coincidencewith Descartes’ manipulation
of a piece of wax occurs in Piaget’s work. In The Child’s Construction of Quantities, by
Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, the central problem is “to determine how the child constructs
extensive . . . quantities from . . . originally phenomenalistic and egocentric qualities.”%
The central question of this text is this: “Is [the child] guided by experience, or by
mental constructions of his
In order to address these questions,
the method we shall be using . . . is extremely simple. The child is handed a
ball of modelling clay, together with a lump of the same material, from which
he is asked to make another ball “as big and as heavy as the first.” Once he
is satisfied that the two balls are identical, the demonstrator changes the
shape of one of them by drawing it out into a coil (a roll or sausage shape),
.by flattening it into a disc, or by cutting it up into pieces. He asks the child if
the two objects still have the same weight, quantity of matter, volume, etc.
The child is expected to justify all his answers, so that it is possible to determine
not only whether or not he accepts the idea of conservation but also how he
substantiates and elaborates it?6
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Our concern, at this juncture, is not to detail all of the stages of the development of
the child’s construction of quantities. Rather, our concern is with the “locale” of the
answers Piaget’s theory generates. “In purely perceptive terms, the coil is not identical
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Piaget, Origins of Intelligence in Children, 19.
31. Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy, 225.
32. Jean Piaget, Structuralism (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 5.
33. This might account for the occasionally hysterical accounts of alternatives to science
found in Piaget’s Insights and lllusions of Philosophy. Anthony Wilden. in his essay “Structure as
Law and Order” (in System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange, ed. A. Wilden
[London: Tavistock Publications, 1980]), provides an interesting analysis of Piagets use of
terminology such as “frontiers” to describe the nature of cognitive schemata. Smith, in ”Children
and the Gods of War,” makes a strong and provocative reading of the emergent “militaristic”
images of contemporary pedagogy.
34. Piaget and Inhelder, The Child’s Construction, viii.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.. 4.
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with the ball: it is less compact, thinner, etc. Before this idea can be dispelled the data
must be elaborated with the help of a system of operations of which identity can Only
be the result and not the so~rce.”~’
The task posed by the series of experiments in Piaget’s work is clear: how does
the child go beyond the phenomenalistic changes of the clay and develop an understanding of what persists independently of such changes (i.e., that the weight, volume,
etc., remain identical in spite of phenomenalistic changes)? Is this, as with Descartes’
work, a question of what “really belongs” to the clay? No. Rather, once the child
realizes that the operations performed on the clay in order to make it into a flat disc
can be reversed, “perceptive relations have made way for operational relation^"^^ such
that “identity has become associated with the operations thernsel~es.”~~
The identity of
material objects is thus equated with the reversible operations that the subject can
perform on the object. In a fashion analogous to the work of Kant, the identity of
objects of experience becomes a function of the constructive activity of the subject.
Substance becomes a matter of the subject’s ability to conserve substance; weight
becomes a matter of the subjects’ ability to conserve weight, and so on. What persists
in phenomenalistic changes is the operational ability of the subject to reverse such
changes and thereby construct ideas of identity, substance, weight, volume, and the
like. These become categories into which empirical experience is organized. Thus, for
example, the identity of material objects is not the source of our idea of identity, but
rather the constructive outcome or “result” of the operations of the subject. In short,
Piaget’s text details the developmental stages in the “intellectual organization of the
external
Questions regarding the nature of the real and our place in it become
questions of the construction of the real and the development of our ability to place
ourselves “in it.’I4’
Transcending subjectivity is not accomplished by asking after that which exists “in
itself,” independent of the constructions of the subject, or by calling on God to guarantee
that the ideas of subjectivity “really belong” to objects, but by asking after those
methods of operation which we share in common with others - the common organizing
activity inherent in life itself. “Objectivity does not. . . mean independence in relation
to the assimilatory activity of intelligence, but simply dissociation from the self and
from egocentric subjectivity.”42It means constructing reality vis-3-vis “processes common to all
A distinction must be at once drawn between the individual subject, centered
on his sense organs or on his own actions-and
hence on the ego or
egocentric subject as a source of possible deformation or illusion of the
“subjective” type in the basic meaning of the term - and the decentered
subject who coordinates his actions as between them and those of others:
who measures, calculates and deduces in a way that can be generally verified;
and whose epistemic activities are therefore common to all subjects, even if
they are replaced by electronic or cybernetic machines with a built-in logical
and mathematical capacity similar to that of the human brainj4
The development of the child is thus understood as the development of the child’s
ability to decenter from egocentric subjectivity and center its activities on the processes
common to all subjects, the processes typical of scientific discourse. It is understood
as the development of the ability to participate in a common construction of the world.
37. Ibid., 11.
38. Ibid., 17.
39. Ibid., 16.
40. Ibid., vii.
41. Jean Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child, trans. Margaret Cook (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1974), xi and passim.
42. Piaget, Origins of Intelligence in Children, 366.
43. Piaget, lnsights and lllusions of Philosophy, 108.
44. Piaget, Psychology of Intelligence, 7-8.
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Such an orientation emerges out of the child’s persistent activity on objects, persistent
accommodation of his or her assimilatory schemata to such activity, and the sequential
equilibration/crystallization of such activity into the structures typical of each level of
development. Without the activity of the subject, the “world” is a meaningless array of
sensory data. “In fact, every relation between the living being and its environment has
this particular characteristic: the former, instead of submitting passively to the latter,
modifies it by imposing on it a certain structure of its own.”45
CONCLUDING
REFLECTIONS
OF PEDAGOGY
AND UNDERSTANDING
AS CONSTRUCTION
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“Education is suffering from narration-sickness” says Paulo Freire. It speaks
out of a story which was once full of enthusiasm, but now shows itself to be
incapable of a surprise ending. The nausea of narration-sickness comes from
having heard enough, from hearing many variations on a theme, but no new
theme. A narrative which is sick may claim to speak for all, yet it has no
aporia, no possibility of meetinga stranger because the text is already complete.
Our theorizing must inevitably become stuck, for then we are no longer
available for that which comes to meet us from beyond ourselves, having
determined in advance the conditions under which any new thing will be
acceptable and thereby foreclosing on the possibility of our own transformatioma
It is possible to consider the children in Piaget’s experiment as the progeny of
Descartes, being handed the equivalent of his wax and being asked what “really
belongs” to it. Of course, Piaget discovers that “some would judge it otherwise” for young children, the same wax does not remain. Piaget’s work thus traces the
sequential development of the child’s inability to judge otherwise than that the same
wax remains.
But there is a much deeper sense in which the children of Piaget’s experiment are
the progeny of Descartes, and there is a profound sense in which they are children
whom Descartes would
The children in Piaget’s experiment are the progeny
of the cogiro and the inheritors of a picture of the world in which nature has become
answerable to the methodical constructions of human understanding. Out of Descartes’
work emerged the possibility of conceiving of the subject as a moment of inquiry. And
out of this moment unfolds the unintended legacy of conceiving the world as answerable
to the methodical manipulations of the subject. Understanding becomes a matter of
construction, and self-understanding, in Piagetian theory, becomes a matter of explicitly
setting forth those constructions in terms of an objective meth~dology.~~
Such a setting
forth houses understanding within the parameters of that which speaks with a common
voice, a common understanding. Such commonness, although it gives rise to the
security that flows from repeatability, verifiability, and methodicalness, can hear no
voice other than its own. As the object of understanding-as-construction,children are
banished to silence. Even in the act of carefully listening to children, which Piaget’s
work exemplifies so clearly, the methodical parameters in which we “ p i g e ~ n - h o l e ” ~ ~
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45. Piaget, Insights and Illusions of Philosophy, 118.
46. Smith, “Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: Facing Pedagogy in the Nuclear Shadow,” 18.
47. It is likely that Descartes would find Piaget’s children inconceivable. He would find it
inconceivablethat, in attempting to understand the world, we find only ourselves and the operations
which we can perform on the world in order to “make” it meaningful. The very notion of the
child’s construction of reality the whole notion of the human subject producing, through its
own acts, the transition from chaos to cosmos (cf. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child,
x) -would be simply too familiar: “In the beginning God created the heaven and earth. And the
earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light”
(cf. Genesis, 1:l).
48. David W. Jardine, “Self-understanding and Reflection in Piagetian Theory: A Phenomenological Critique,” Journal of Mucational Thought, 21, no. 4 (1987).
49. Cf. Piaget, lnsights and fllusions of Philosophy, 55.
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what they have to say is already understood, already mapped out ahead of time.
Listening to children might give us new empirical information about their conceptions
of the world, but it will never put in jeopardy the methodical constructions in terms of
which such conceptions “make sense.” Whatever children have to say, that speech
must become recast as the object of scientific discourse if it is to count. That discourse
itself is never put into question by alternate forms of speech since, for Piaget, it is
only in the securing of scientific discourse against such disruption that it becomes
objective, that it becomes truly scientific, Thus, “the method of modern science is
characterized from the start by a refusal: namely, to exclude all that which actually
eludes its own methods and proced~res.”~~
Such a monological picture of understanding as operating within its own constructions threatens the foreclosure of understanding to any other voice. In the end, the
goal of understanding-as-constructionis closure, completeness, mastery, and, in the
end, silence, the completion of the pedagogical narrative. In education conceived after
a model of understanding-as-construction,
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ideally, research orients to that first articulation of what it means to be a child
or an adult about which nothing more needs to be said, about which no further
specification is needed or possible, in relation to which every variable has
been controlled such that, in the end, research would dispel the need of saying
more. Being an adult or being a child would, ideally, become exhausted issues,
in need of no further consideration. This accounts for the rather manic and
hysterical character of some forms of education research, and the relentless
proliferation of “research data” which has disassembled children and adults
into the smallest specifiable variables. The impetus of such research seems
to be the fixing of the as-yet-unfixed variable, the discovery of which in and
of itself warrants further research. The goal of such research seems to be
silence - the end of the need to address such issues.s1
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Orienting to understanding-as-construction, the language of education orients to silence,
not as a moment finally to attend to what goes beyond our own constructions, but as
an outcome of a universalizing discourse which wishes to exhaust the possibilities of
speech, the possibility of saying more.
Clearly in the area of pedagogy, the text is not yet complete. But it is equally clear
that we live in a culture which desires such completion. As educational theorists, we
live with the cultural desire finally to get the child’s curriculum rigM once and for all,
to fix our relation to every possible feature of the child’s life methodically so that the
pedagogical act will not have to live with uncertainty, ambiguity, risk. We will have finally
mastered it once and for all. And we often do this without first asking whether such
risk, ambiguity, and uncertainty are essential to the character of understanding itself.
We live with the frightening prospect that the nature of understanding is in the first
place to secure ourselves methodically against the possibility of rni~understanding,~‘
as if the breach of understanding were not an ecstatic moment of self-transcendence,
wherein we can finally understand something more than just the method we practice.
A breach of understanding is not pictured this way. Rather, it is seen as simply a falling
away from objectivity and the self-security of method. It is this sort of picture that has
led one author53to reflect on the militaristic metaphors of contemporary pedagogy. We
come to see the teachable moment as the opportunity, not for attending to a particular
child, but for gearing up for a surgical strike against children. We come to see threats
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50. Hans-GeorgGadamer, PhilosophicalHermeneutics(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1977),93.
51. Cf. David W. Jardine and Dieter Misgeld, “Hermeneutics as the Undisciplined Child:
Reflections on Hermeneutic and Technical Understanding,” in lnterpretive Investigations: Contributions to Psychological Research, ed. R. Addison and M. J. Packer (Albany: SUNY Press,
forthcoming).
52. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 15.
53. Cf. Smith, ”Children and the Gods of War.”
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to teacher accountability not as a moment to reflect on what children might need or
as a call for a pause in the relentlessness of our active intervention in children’s lives,
but as a call for the endless proliferation of forms, tests, and charts which will provide
us with our own version of a strategic defense initiative - an initiative which will allow
us to continue to act and which will allow us to escape the need to reflect on the
warrantability of such action. And all the while, we engender this picture of understanding
in our children. We engender in our children the same fear of losing ourselves54to
something more than our own constructions, that which we can wield to make the
world into an object of our mastery and control.
But what is the alternative to understanding-as-construction? We cannot stop this
by simply declaring an end to it or being adamantly passive, which simply works itself
out as a form of passive aggressiveness and refusal. “Can we find ourselves a position
between, on the one hand, a methodological fanaticism which would forbid us to
understand anything besides the method we practice, and, on the other, a feeble
eclecticism which would exhaust itself in inglorious c ~ m p r o m i s e ? ”We
~ ~ must find a
way to help our children ask after what is at stake in action, what is at stake in speech,
and this requires a sensitivity to what life situations call for, a sensitivity to what
addresses us. What is required is a picture of understanding as dialogical rather than
monological. When it is conceived as dialogical, one always begins within the parameters
of one’s own understanding, one’s own experience, one’s own constructions. But the
goal of dialogue is not simply to reproduce the world in the image of those prejudices,
however essential they may be as the point from which understanding begins. It is not
to create the world in our own image, but to be open to what we cannot imagine by
ourselves. In dialogue, it is essential to listen for another voice and to orient to finding
a mutual understanding, a kinship between this voice and my own. There is no
methodical standpoint from which mutual understanding proceeds, since it is precisely
where I stand in relation to my interlocutor that is at issue in such a search for mutual
understanding.An orientation to the dialogical character of education requires something
other than relentless action and endless speech. It requires listening, attending, and,
very often, silence. It requires envisaging understanding as sometRing other than a
form of methodological self-defense where what is “other” or “different,” what falls
outside my own constructions, is nothing more than an enemy or a threat.
It is an implicit hatred of difference that leads to Ricoeur’s notion of methodological
fanaticism. It is the search for univocity, for one voice, for identity. Univocal speech
conceives the act of understanding as a desire to dispel difference: “Difference becomes
a problem to be solved and subsumed under a condition of mastery and e~planation.”~~
In such an act, understanding children is to turn them inside-out, to search out every
nook and cranny, so that we will no longer be surprised, so there will be no surprise
ending, so the narrative will be complete. But the opposite of such subsumption is not
the scattering of speech into differences, where every understanding is compromised
by being understood as bound by the isolation of “the individual.”
In a hermeneutic conception of understanding, identity and difference are not the
alternatives. In dialogue with another person, I do not become identical to my interlocutor,
but neither can I remain simply different. In dialogue, mutual understanding is sought,
but it is sought in such a way that our real differences are preserved while, at the
same time, kinships, resemblances, or analogies of understanding emerge.57In the
area of education, this phenomenon of analogical interrelatedness is especially important. We find ourselves constantly in the presence of those who think differently than
we do and, at the same time, finding these others as persons whom we wish to engage,
to understand, to educate. As teachers, we find that “the full meaning of a child . . . resides
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54. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 51.
55. Paul Ricoeur, cited in F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the lnterpretationof Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 80.
56. Smith, “Children and the Gods of War,” 4.
57. Cf. David W. Jardine and G. A. V. Morgan, “Analogy as a Model for the Development of
Representational Abilities in Children,” Educational Theory 37, no. 3 (1987): 209-18.
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in the paradox of being part of us but also apart from us.”58 We find ourselves in
kinship with children, belonging together with children, while neither being quite the
same or simply different. We find, as teachers, that we must live in the dialogue between
same and different in which mutual understanding is sought. Effective teachers cannot
begin with a refusal: namely, a retreat into their own constructions and the limits of
their own strategic action. In the pedagogical act, then, children cannot become the
passive object of mastery and control, but neither is this act simply handed over to
children as an inglorious compromise with their differen~e.~’
The analogical character
of dialogue lives in a tension between same and different, and understanding is not
produced by the dispelling of this tension, but by sustaining ourselves in it. We find, in
such an orientation, that “genuine life together is made possible only in the context of
an ongoing conversation which is never over yet which also must be sustained for life
together to go on at all.”s0 The other voice thereby becomes a moment in my own
understanding and self-understanding. It is only in being open to another voice that I
can hear my own voice as authentically my own.
The legacy of understanding-as-constructionis deeply engrained in Western culture,
and we, as educators, often find ourselves caught up in its relentlessness. It is difficult
to imagine that true speech might emerge out of silence, that action becomes exquisite
when it is borne out of “inaction” - out of waiting, listening, attending. This requires
that we allow that the pedagogical narrative is not complete and that such incompleteness is not a call for more stringent mastery and control, but is an indication of the
nature of how we live our lives in relation to children - in an ongoing dialogue which
recognizes our inexorable difference from children while expressing ever anew our
kinship with children. The pedagogical narrative is not complete, but the narration
sickness remains. A hermeneutic conception of the pedagogical narrative as essentially
dialogical/analogicaI may help address this sickness, but we are not dealing here simply
with a matter of education theory and practice, but with something much more endemic.
As I complete this paper, I find my son working out his understanding of the world,
himself, and others through the medium of Masters of the Universe. I think 1’11 go talk
with him. I hope that I can hear what he has to say.
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58. Smith, “Children and the Gods of War,” 4.
59. “The old unilateral options of gericentrism (appealing to the authority of age, convention,
tradition, nostalgia) and pedocentrism (child-centered pedagogy) only produce monstrous states
of siege which are irresponsible to the matters at hand, i.e., to the question of how life is mediated
through relations between old and young.” Smith, “Children and the Gods of War,” 7.
60. Ibid., 4.
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