QuickTake: How Does Knowledge Grow?

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is a legend in teaching and learning circles. The question at the core of his research was, "How does knowledge grow?"

His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive 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. Therefore, children's logic and modes of thinking are initially entirely different from those of adults.

Piaget's oeuvre is known all over the world and is still an inspiration in fields like psychology, sociology, education, epistemology, economics and law as witnessed in the annual catalogues of the Jean Piaget Archives.

Notice that 25 years after his death Piaget is still an inspiration in diverse fields, including economics. While Piaget was concerned with exploring how children learn, Malcolm Knowles focused on adult learning. Since college students are often not quite adults and certainly not children anymore, the question about how their knowledge grows has always been an issue in my mind. Is Piaget's pedagogy or Knowles' andragogy more relevant to excellence in college teaching? Future posts will explore the issue.