Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erikson Theories

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Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erikson offer different views of how a child’s mental abilities progress throughout their education. Piaget believed that children, at certain stages in their lives, regardless of intelligence, were not able to understand things in particular ways, simply because they were not old enough. He thought that development had to precede learning. Vygotsky, on the other hand, theorized that children acquire their level of intelligence by the culture they live in and that children learning different things helped them to develop intellectually. Erikson felt as if the environment played a major role in a child’s development and that every person goes through specific stages in their lives. Each stage having a direct effect on the next. This review will give an example of how each of these men have influenced education and teaching methods. Piaget, Meet Lilly: Understanding Child Development through Picture Book Charcters discusses how Piaget would have described Lilly, a little girl with a purple plastic purse full of goodies, as being egocentric because she would assume that everyone in her class would feel the same as she did about her new things, simply because they were the same age as she. Lilly would then get mad at the teacher for taking her things because she could not understand why the teacher would not want her disrupting the class. The article also touches on Piaget’s term assimilation and how a child will use what he or she already know to try and better understand a particular subject. The book Fish by Fish by Leo Lionni is a good example of this because it shows how a fish, being told a story by a frog, about different people and things that he has come across in his journeys, imagines what they look like. The fish sees them all as fish-like animals or things because that is all he has been around. Piaget felt that
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