Journal 13

For my taxonomy project I chose the learning theorist Piaget! You caught me, I do know a lot about him because of my background in Psychology. I actually forgot how much I actually knew about him until I started researching him! He believed that children could only learn certain things during certain stages in life, not before the stage, only within. He focused on maturation as the key importance for understanding new skills. I call bull #*@&. One of his main ideas is adaptation, which is adapting to the world around you through assimilation and accommodation. Kids are learning to adapt constantly and different kids can learn and adapt at different rates. Some can comprehend faster than others. I do not believe that learning certain skills or mental realizations can be confined within a certain age or all humans. I do agree that with maturation comes more understanding and that there are certain ages that reflect certain understanding more than others, but I think those boundaries do not pertain to everyone. The fact that this was used pertaining to the way school is structured is understandable, but maybe if students were put in classrooms with older students, it would prove that children can gain understanding of skills earlier because of the collaboration that would go on between the young and the older students. Children who have developed skills faster than others, which does happen, will get bored and be unmotivated to learn. The fact that some children skip grades proves that Piaget was wrong in saying that any child no matte how bright cannot move on mentally until a certain age. Also if that was the case, then everyone would have the exact same skills as everyone else, and no one would ever move ahead. Everyone would be considered equally knowledgable at those ages.