The Psychology of Learning

In the nineteenth century – and, in too many countries, throughout much of the twentieth – children were regarded and taught as if they were just small versions of adults. It took two educational psychologists, Jean Piaget, a Swiss, and Maria Montessori, an Italian, to demonstrate that children’s cognitive skills were simply not the same as adults’. In short, children see and analyse the world around them very differently from their parents. Of course, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had already outlined stages which young children had to navigate to become balanced adults. Piaget and Montessori did not share Freud’s focus though on the psychological health of adults as their starting point: it was children they observed, interacted with and offered guidelines for more effective learning.