Jean Piaget: “When you teacha child something, you take away forever his opportunity to discover it for himself.”
"Stage theories" can seem rigid and unrealistic. Theorists, such as Vygotsky and Bruner, would rather not talk about stages at all, they like to see development as a continualprocess. Others do not believe in the ageranges of the stages either. Some studies show that the progress to the formaloperationalstage is notguaranteed. For example, researchers reported that 40-60% of college students fail at formaloperationtasks. Only one-third of adults reach the formal operational stage in life (McLeod, 2012).
Piaget only studied white Europeans in Switzerland, generally he used his own children. This sample is biased and the results of these studies cannot be generalized to children from different cultures. So does development differ by culture or society at all?
Evidence is showing that Piaget seriouslyunderestimatedyoungchildren'sabilities to store, remember, and organizesensory and motorinformation. Babies pay muchmore attention to patterns, sequences, and prototypicalfeatures than Piaget thought.