Piaget was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland on August 9,1896. His father, Arthur Piaget, was a professor of literature. His mother was Rebecca Jackson. Piaget was the oldest child. He published his first paper when he was ten. It was about his sighting of an albino sparrow. His publishing really began when he was in high school. He published many papers on mollusks. Because of his great work with mollusks, he began a job with the director of Neuchâtel’s Museum of Natural History. Piaget experienced a crisis in what he wanted to do in life. His mother wanted him to study religion, however, he did not feel the same as she did. After high school, Piaget went to the University of Neuchâtel. He tried studying philosophy and to finding a biological explanation of knowledge, but this did not interest him. In 1918, Piaget received his Doctorate in Science, a PhD, from the University of Neuchâtel. After graduation, he spent a semester at the University of Zurich working in a psychology lab. Here, he became interested in psychoanalysis after being introduced to Freud, Jung, and many others. He then moved to Paris to study abnormal psychology. In 1919, Piaget taught psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the Sorbonne, he met Simon and started doing research on intelligence testing. This is where he did his first experiments dealing with the mind. In 1921, Piaget published his first article on intelligence and it was published in the Journal de Psychologie. Also, in 1921, he began working at the J.J. Rousseau Institute in Geneva. He began research that focused on elementary school children and he proceeded to write five books about the elementary school children and how they think. In 1923, Piaget married Valentine Châtenay. Valentine was Piaget’s co-worker. Their daughters, Jacqueline and Lucienne, were born in 1925 and 1927; and their son, Laurent, was born in 1931. Piaget and his wife wrote three books based on the observations of their children. In 1929, Piaget began working at the Bureau International Office de l’Education as the director. In 1940, Piaget became the chair of Experimental Psychology, the director of the psychology lab, and the president of the Swiss Society of Psychology. In 1942, he gave many lectures, The Psychology of Intelligence, at the Collège de France. In 1949 and 1950, he published Introduction to Genetic Epistemology. In 1952, Piaget became a professor at the Sorbonne. He created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in 1955. He was director for the remainder of his life. Piaget created the School of Sciences at the University of Geneva in 1956. He died in Geneva on September 16, 1980 and is remembered as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century.
