Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

z6o Jean Piaget
Given this mixture, after a certain stage of further partial adaptation andinnate
guidance, and given the revised ideas of contemporary biology concerning
the relations of the phenotype and the genotype, the up-and-coming generation
of ethologists now speaks of innateness only with caution and likes to use the
expression ‘what used to be called innate’. Lehrmann and others have pointed
to the possibility of exercices right from the initial phase of instinctive behaviour,
so that the reciprocal action of maturation x experience seems to be even closer
than was assumed by past research. Viaud has said that Lorenz’s concept of the
instinct was an extreme one never embodied in reality.
The instinct would thus seem to have three components: an organizing and
regulating mechanism which conditions heredity, a more or less detailed hered-
itary programming and adaptations or modifications acquired by each individ-
ual. On the splitting-up of the instinct in the higher primates and in man, it is
therefore the intermediate part that fades or disappears, but there remain the
organizing mechanism and adaptive modifications, the two basic requirements of
the intelligence, which is directed towards both the domination of external
objects and towards the realization and reconstruction of the conditions inher-
ent in the organization or general co-ordination of actions.
11. It is this building of the structures of the intelligence that enables us above
all to analyse the study of psychogenesis in the child. It is at present the subject
of intensive study in a number of countries. There are various trends, of which
we shall now point out the main ones.
First, Gesell and Wallon have stressed the part played by nervous matura-
tion, an indisputable factor whose effects are discernible at the initial sensori-
motor levels (e.g., in the myelinization of the pyramidal tract, which makes it
possible to co-ordinate sight and prehension). But the further development
proceeds, themorenervous maturation (which lasts till the age of 15 or 16 at
least) is confined to the opening up of possibilities, without any programming,
and the possibilities give rise to multiple realizations only in so far as other
factors intervene. Wallon has placed special emphasis on the part played by the
maturation of the postural or tonic system, which, while being closely bound
up with the working of the emotions (regarded by him as a positive factor),
foreshadows the figurative aspects of thought (images, etc.. .).
A second basic factor, on which often the same authors take their stand with
the explicit or implicit idea that the life of the mind is reduced to a combination
of organic and social factors, is the part played by the society around us. Wallon,
the old Viennese school (Ch. Biihler) and especially, at the present time, Soviet
psychologists following in the tradition of Vigotsky, have helped to uncover a
large number of important facts in this connexion. However, two equally signif-
icant points have been emphasized. The first is that the child is responsive to
adult influences only in so far as he assimilates them. Though J. Bruner has
maintained that in principle a child can be taught anything at any age, someone
who opposes this view asked, during a discussion on the subject, how much
time it would take to teach the theory of relativity to a neighbour who was neither
a physicist nor a mathematician. When the reply came ‘three to four years’, he