Jim Dougan wrote:
TIPsters,
I am curious to hear your opinions about the place of Piaget in a History and Systems course. My immediate reason for asking is because of a (relatively friendly) argument with my department chair. I have been teaching History and Systems for years, and I do not include Piaget. My chair, a developmentalist "cannot conceive of a course in H&S without Piaget." The fact that many H&S textbooks do not include Piaget does not seem to sway him.
All of the textbooks on my shelf for H&S at least have Piaget mentioned in the index. Usually they devote at least a couple of pages
Here is my justification for excluding Piaget:
1) It don't think Piaget fits the structure of my course. I teach a very traditional (E.G. Boring influenced) course in which I trace the "main line" of psychological history, but I do not trace the history of the branches. In my own area, I of course cover Watson and Skinner, but I would never cover Herrnstein. Watson and Skinner are main line, Herrnstein is speciality material belonging in a behavioral course but not an H&S course. I similarly view Piaget as being out of the mainstream. He belongs in a development course, but not a mainstream H&S course.
Whose mainstream? I don't know Boring's course well, but I look at both the academic/experimental strand and the applied/clinical strand--how they intersect and build on each other.
To this. my chair responds that Piaget has had a tremendous influence in mainstream psychology - for example, he cites Piaget as a major contributor to the cognitive revolution. Which brings us to argument #2:
2) Piaget's work was "discovered" by mainstream psychology far too late to have had a real historical influence. Piaget's work wasn't really recognized until the mid 1960s, by which time the cognitive revolution was well under way. Though some Piagetian terms do show up in cognitive (for example, schema) they often mean very different things.
Even if Piaget's work did not precipitate the cognitive "revolution" in American experimental psychology, his views influenced subsequent work in the cognitive approach. I think he belongs in a history course, even one that focuses more on experimental "mainstream"
This is not a really big deal - there isn't anything riding on the resolution. I am just curious to hear opinions.
-- Jim Dougan
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Terry Rew-Gottfried Lawrence University
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