Compare and contrast the contributions to progressive educational thought of Sigmund Freudand Jean Piaget.

        Through this theory Freud concluded that nurture is highly relevant to a child’s psychosexual development and subsequent social integration. He believed that socialization was not a natural condition, and to account for the fact that a child become socialized he adduces rather the necessity of repressive action on behalf of parents and other secondary educators.

He accuses education, stating that it begins with the act of preventing certain spontaneous urges or drives from expressing themselves freely.

These “spontaneous urges or drives” emerge from an individual’s intrinsic “pleasure principle”. The pleasure principle requires “Pleasure! Now!”, and is the opposite of the infinitely more conservative “reality principle”. Freud thought that when infants experience a need, they imagine the food or the event or the person that will meet that need. Soon they learn that the inadequacy of this way of getting needs met and discover that they must attend to, and learn the rules of, the external world, of reality. As the “reality principle” develops, children learn to estimate consequences.

I don’t feel like doing my homework, but I choose not to incur the teacher’s displeasure and possible punishment.

Freud feared that, in his time, the role of education was “dominating, or more properly repressing action” associated with the pleasure principle.  The goal of the process was to steer the child from the immediacy of desire to the restraint of social reality. For Freud education was defined as the adult’s action or impact upon the child, facilitating the transition from pleasure to reality. He went further, urging that education is the practice “whereby adults compel children, more or less strictly, to forego the immediacy of instinctual pleasure and replace it with a readiness to tow the line of reality”.

        In addition to the notions of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Freud introduced the notion of the id, ego and super-ego. The id follows the pleasure principle and wants immediate satisfaction. Ego is the determiner of the person’s behaviours and follows the reality principle. The super-ego is positively related to moral development, and acts as a conscience, for example, a famous Chinese proverb “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”, is the behaviour from a super-ego ideal. This very brief summary is in order to conclude that when education “represses” the pleasure principle, it represses the id, and encourages dominance of the ego. This is in direct contrast to what Freud urged as an optimum state, namely equilibrium between id, ego and super-ego.

        However, although Freud doesn’t renounce a minimum repression of instincts, he is much less categorical about the alternative it seems to suggest. If education’s ultimate goal is indeed to establish the reality principle whereby individual behaviour is regulated, its establishment in no way implies a process of substitution. Once again Freud urges equilibrium.

        It is certainly true that the nature of Freud’s arguments both on development, and subconscious, are liable to encourage a mixed response, and cynics are quick to condemn his theories. Therapists claim that his theories are ineffective in treating mental disorders, and that the very nature of them prevents any form of scientific empirical test. They also frown on the complete absence of cognitive functions in any of his conjecture. Most importantly, however, many believe he overemphasizes many of the departure points for his theories, including the conflict between the id and super-ego, the importance of the sub-conscious, the determination of early childhood experiences and trauma and the sex drives. It is claimed that although these aspects play a role in personality development, they are not exclusive.

        What lessons, then, can progressive educationalists learn from Freud’s teachings? Whether one agrees with the titles and potential repercussions of his psychosexual stages, he does encourage an understanding of the qualitative development of a child. He advocates psychosexual stages, whereas Erik Erickson concluded that children move through psycho-social stages. Lawrence Kohlberg made use of his own moral stages and finally, as I will explore later, Piaget believed in cognitive stages. With so many prominent developmental psychologists advocating a discontinuous method of development, Freud calls on us to understand it better, and to then investigate and thereby increase awareness of the role parents and other secondary educators play in that development.

        In his condemnation of repression Freud urges equilibrium between the pleasure and reality principle, and claims that they are complementary, and he therefore encourages the pleasure principle which facilitates both imagination and subsequently creativity, which becomes important in Piaget’s teachings, which I explore below.

        The task of education, according to Freud, is therefore not to prohibit or frustrate, but to discover a sort of balance between the search for pleasure that continues to govern physical equilibrium after the process of socialization has been completed and the constraints that the natural and social realities impose upon our primitive instincts.

The main aim of all education is to teach the child to control its instincts. It is indeed impossible to allow it total freedom…without constraint. Education must therefore inhibit, forbid and repress, and it is to this task that it has at all times applied itself to in full. However, analysis has shown us that it is in fact such repression that causes neuroses. Education must therefore navigate its way between the Scylla of the laissez-faire approach and the Charybdis of prohibition.

Education was defined by Piaget as a two termed relation linking “on the one hand the growing individual and one the other hand the social, intellectual and moral values into which the educator is charged with initiating that individual” Piaget believed that individuals develop from birth onwards, and in-part this development is causal for psycho-social investigation. He believed that children, by exploring their environment, create their own cognitive, or intellectual, conceptions of reality. This train of thought led him to consider himself a “genetic epistemologist” rather than an educationalist. Epistemology is the philosophical discipline concerning the nature of knowledge, and Piaget concluded that what distinguishes human beings from animals, epistemologically speaking, is our ability to carry out “abstract symbolic meaning”. He subsequently became interested in how a child develops mentally in order to accomplish this, and named his particular process “maturation”.

He became interested in the way children think while working in Binet’s IQ test lab in Paris. He noticed that younger children’s answers to Binet’s questions were qualitatively different to those of older children. He concluded that the younger children were not necessarily less knowledgeable, but instead thought in a different way. He explained it as qualitative thought rather than quantitative thought.

He believed that the growth of knowledge is a progressive and continual construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower, less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood. 

There are two major to aspects to his theory, the process of how an individual comes to “know” something, and the stages that individual moves through as they gradually acquire this ability. As a biologist he was interested in how an organism adapts to its environment and he described this ability as “intelligence”.

The behaviour of individuals as they adapt is controlled through a series of mental organizations called “schemes” that the individual can use to represent the world and designate action. This adaptation is driven by a biological drive to obtain balance between schemes and the environment. Piaget further hypothesized that infants are born with primitive schemes, known as “reflexes”. In all other animals these reflexes continue to govern their action and behaviour. In humans, however, the infant uses these reflexes to adapt to the environment, and the reflexes are then replaced with “constructed schema”.

Piaget outlined several principles for building cognitive schema and structures. During all development stages, the child experiences his environment using whatever “mental maps” he has constructed so far. If the experience is a repeated one, it fits easily, or is assimilated, into the child’s cognitive structure so that he maintains “mental equilibrium”. If the experience is different or new, the child loses equilibrium and alters his cognitive structure to accommodate the new conditions. This way, the child erects more and more adequate cognitive structures.

Assimilation and Accommodation are the two complementary processes of adaptation described by , through which awareness of the outside world is internalised. Although one may predominate at any one moment, they are inseparable and exist in a dialectical relationship.

Assimilation is the process of transforming the environment so that its contributing factors can easily be placed in pre-existing cognitive structures, whereas accommodation is the process of changing cognitive structures in order to accept something alien from the environment. A common example is that of a baby sucking on a bottle. Assimilation concerns an infant using a sucking schema, which was developed by sucking on a small bottle, when attempting to suck on a larger bottle. If an infant modifies a sucking schema, developed by sucking on a pacifier, to one that would be successful for sucking on a bottle, then this is accommodation.

As these schemes become increasingly complex and responsible for more complex behaviours, they are termed “structures”. As one’s structures become more complex, they are organized in a hierarchical manner, ranging from general to specific.

        These techniques for adaptation allow for discontinuous qualitative development, with an individual “stepping” from one stage to another as more complex cognitive structures are developed. Piaget described four stages of cognitive development and relates them to a person’s ability to understand and assimilate new information. The “sensorimotor stage” lasts from birth to about two, and during this stage the child learns about himself and his environment through motor and reflex action, and consequent thought derives from sensation and movement, and he becomes aware of object permanence. The “preoperational stage” begins about the time the child starts to talk and last until about seven. Applying a new knowledge of language, the child begins to use symbols to represent objects, he has difficultly conceptualizing time, and his thinking is often influenced by fantasy. During the “concrete stage” the child approaches early adolescence and accommodation increases. The child develops an ability to think abstractly and to make rational judgments about concrete or observable phenomena, which in the past he needed to manipulate physically. In the final “formal operation stage” cognition is brought to its final stage. The individual no longer requires concrete objects to make rational judgments. At this point, he is capable of hypothetical and deductive reasoning.

        Piaget’s ideas emphasized the importance of experience in the education of a child, and his teaching allowed education to progress from simply a distributor of knowledge, to a distributor of understanding. Piagetian techniques involve encouraging accommodation rather than assimilation from an early stage, ideally expecting children to formulate their own methods of understanding what is being taught, or in a sense, re-discovering it for themselves. Piaget believed that this prevented the fact that “in most countries the school turns out linguists, grammarians, historians and mathematicians but fails to educate the inquiring mind.”:

Einstein’s teachers did not teach him that e = mc2. Novelty can lead to the recasting of available knowledge in veritable revolutions that go beyond what is taught.

Piaget asserted that for a child to simply “know” something, was not sufficient to move through his cognitive stages to a state of abstract development. They much understand it. He realised that if education was necessary and insufficient, something else was required as well, and he subsequently came up with his thoughts on “equilibration” or complex learning.

        According to Piaget, there were two principles of equilibration. Primarily he asserted the importance of creativity, “whether as a novel construction by the genius, or re-construction by the rest of us”. Cognitive development requires cognitive action, and if the human mind is in action then it has a greater potential to advance. Piaget suggested that if a mind is in the throes of imagination, in which each individual is led to “think and re-think the system of collective notions”, development though the cognitive stages is more possible.

        As a consequence of this we can ascertain that living minds are “minds in action”, and therefore have the capacity to make better judgments. This led Piaget to his second point, the effectiveness of education in this principle. He concluded that what is important in education is that it encourages creativity, and that there must be creative design of learning tasks which are cognitively empowering rather than disabling.

This occurs in the triggering of the transformations required for novel learning.

Piaget made a further stipulation in the form of a question.

Is reasoning an act of obedience, or is obedience an act of reason?

The simple act of divulging truths to individuals who make response in accordance, and in obedience, to what is being taught, is less effective in encouraging accommodation. Obedience as an act of reason, however, requires greater thought. This results in more “minds in action”, cognitively developing, as individuals take charge of their learning by converting the reasons for their responses into good reason, even if this ultimately results in rational disobedience to what is taught.

Freud emphasized the psychosexual development which, in turn, draws attention to the personality development dynamics, structures and stages. Piaget, on the other hand, focused on cognitive development dynamics, structures and stages. Each underline different part of the causes of behaviour, and thus they have different interpretations of said behaviour, and of what, during development, gives rise to it. However both saw a human’s development as stage-by-stage and both recognized that an individual adopts assimilation and accommodation strategies to sustain equilibrium.

        Perhaps the most interesting contrast is the nature of instinct. Piaget believed in cognitive structures forming through assimilation and accommodation during his four cognitive stages. Education, in his eyes, further assisted this. Via the curriculum, educators must plan a developmentally appropriate course, that enhances their student’s logical and conceptual growth. In instruction, teachers must emphasise the critical role that experiences play in student learning, for example the role that fundamental concepts, such as object permanence, play in establishing cognitive structures. Education acts as an assistor to natural development. Freud, on the other hand, accused education of repressing natural instinct in an attempt to socialize children, by making them culturally suitably to be integrated into the social-collective, for example parents forbidding the physical expression of their child’s psychosexual stages. Freud himself, although critical of this approach, and fully aware of the potential risks in terms of a suitable sexual development in later life, realized the importance of minimal repression in order to achieve equilibrium. For Piaget, progressive education must passively promote a child’s natural cognitive development through the encouragement of experience, creativity and accommodation. For Freud education must actively encourage the notion of “delayed gratification”, stemming the free-reign of the pleasure principle, though never totally repressing it or punishing it, and increase its own awareness of its role in an individual’s development.

References:

---