Jean Piaget 1896–1980

interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly irrational utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it “a discovery so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.” Although not an educational reformer, Piaget championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today's education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the way modern anthropology displaced stories of primitive tribes being “noble savages” and “cannibals”. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children's thinking seriously.