Introducing Piaget

To first understand how influencing stories and images are to children’s development, it is crucial to understand how a child’s mind works and takes in information. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist best known for his extensive studies into children’s development shows valuable insight to the way children think socially. Piaget writes,

“The human being is immersed right from birth in a social environment which affects him just as much as his physical environment. Society, even more, in a sense, than the physical environment, changes the very structure of the individual, because it not only compels him to recognize facts, but also provides him with a ready-made system of signs, which modify his thought.” (Piaget, 171)

This idea is backed with three main steps of how a child learns and assimilates themselves in their society. These steps come when a child acquires a basic ability to comprehend language. The first step in a child’s understanding is the recognizing of collective signs. However, this understanding may not be complete, and the child must ‘play out’ and interpret ideas through gestures, or creative means- such as drawing and construction. The second step is a better understanding that,

“Language conveys to the individual an already prepared system of ideas, classifications, relations-in short, an inexhaustible stock of concepts which are reconstructed in each individual after the age old pattern which previously moulded earlier generations.” (Piaget, 175).

This step is particularly valid in understanding why folk tales are still retold and used in modern times after centuries of use. The socially benefitting ideas and morals told in folk tales are still rendered useful and true to what’s encouraged into today’s society. The third step in a child’s intellectual growth is his external learning, the relations held with fellow beings and the outside world. This step will thus be the main method of learning from then on, as the child will be able to then on have more intensive exchanges of values and forced to accept more obligatory truths. Because of this statement, it is also useful in this step to bring up the main ideas of folk tales to understand the connections they already make towards young children.