Over the years, psychologists have identified 3 theoretical types of development. Some believe humans follow a stage-like learning process, implying spurts of knowledge gain in within snippets in time. Another is called domain general, meaning all the maturing happens at once while domain-specific entails that skills develop independently. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, took a keen interest to the development of children and believed that children were the former, and underwent a stage-like development. Piaget would have seen a child and believed that at that period in their life, this exact moment, they would be developing, perhaps, a social need by talking to an adult. During that given time period, which is undeterminable, that child would learn the most from social experiences. Later, say a few months, that same child might harness some motor skills by increased involvement in athletic activities with other children in a similar stage. If a child had a certain need, he would move on to the next stage of development in order to mature. Piaget exclaimed that children are not miniature adults, but that the two perspectives of either cohort vary greatly in fundamental reasoning due to their limited worldly experience. Equilibration is the maintenance of experiences, combining what is known with what is observed, basically the creation of schemas. For example, children are prone to believe that the world is flat without ever seeing a globe or otherwise. As soon as they do see a globe, they must combine all knowledge that they’ve accumulated into this fact making sense. The two ways that knowledge imprints are by assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the assimilation of knowledge, the acceptance to new stimuli. Accommodation is a way of processing new intelligence so that it coincides with a previous schema.
Piaget’s stages of development are as follows. The sensorimotor stage, lasting from birth to 2 years, involves the development of comprehension of what is immediately available. Out of sight, out of mind. Also the training of basic senses and movement are developed in this stage. Next is the preoperational stage and it lasts from year 2 to 7. Though the individual may not be able to think beyond themselves and their own needs, but can think beyond the present. Those in the concrete operation stage can perform mental transformations but only with physical objects, from 7 to 11. And the fourth and final stage is that of formal operations, from year 11 to adulthood, consists of an expansion of the previous stage. This is the stage of thinking for oneself, a deeper level of processing, hypothesizing and experimenting to solve problems.
(I personally believe that we can turn ourselves on and off to different intelligences, so yes, his stage like theory makes sense to me, however, it’s a more immediate, more continuous accumulation of knowledge. I feel that this observation describes the stages in school, such as phy Ed, then math, then choir, then science…etc. We activate different parts of the brain for different things, but perhaps knowledge is relative, at least what we learn in school. Social skills take over when we’re not sitting in a desk, and motor skills take over when we’re on a field or court. We aren’t necessarily not in stages, but more perceptible to gaining from those experiences that are vital to us at that moment. We’ll only stop learning when we shut our brains off, when we say “I don’t want to take anything from this”. Given Piaget is true, our stage-like development will never end, we will never stop learning, forgetting is what we fail to encode in the first place.)
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