When in 1963, John Flavell translated Piaget's La Naissance de l'Intelligence chez l'Enfant (The Birth of Intelligence in the Child, 1936), many developmental psychologists opted for a Piagetian view over Empiricist notions of the child mind as a blank slate or Nativist claims of innately specified cognitive structures. Piaget's theory offered developmentalists a way of capturing the dynamics of progressive development and of considering the child as an active participant in his own cognitive growth.
There followed a flourish of research on sensori-motor development, object permanence, concrete and formal operations, many with the purpose of demonstrating that the ages at which children achieved these milestones were much younger than Piaget's theory claimed. But, in my view, those efforts missed the point.
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