I brought Up J. P. early in my course, when talking about "ages and stages" theories of history (a la Sir James Frazer) -- making the comparison with "stages" theories from circa 1900 in biology, sociology, and psych. My HoP students were seniors, and most of them had been "taught Piaget" in Intro, and again in developmental psychology. Every year, I remembered Piaget's details very badly -- a ruse to elicit help from my students that worked pretty well to encourage discussion. (Some students appear to have sworn to a kind of omerta or know-nothing law, but you can sometimes friendly them out of it. They're pretty sure to be able to supply, or at least confirm, terms like "preoperational;" you might have to fish a while for "animistic" etc.)
I had J. P. appearing a second time circa. 1200, because of his wonderful interviews with children on the subject of nominalism. (In Child's conception of the world, I think. How did the mountains, stars, etc, get their names? How did the children come to be named, etc.) If it's not precisely the same "nominalism" that Peter Lombard and Co. promoted, it's not unrelated, and it's a lot more fun for your students to read J. P.'s interviews than The Book of Sentences, or anything else published in the Scholastic Era.
I did find, by the way, that somebody was pretty sure to tell me on the final that Piaget was an Ancient Greek or a Scholastic Monk. (Thus I ferreted out students too feeble to separate historical chronology from the sequence of ideas in the course, in spite of the fact that I made Piaget's dates perfectly clear in at least three lectures -- the third being a brief reminder about J. P. late in the course in my preamble to the 20th C.) If you want to, you could certainly "do" Piaget and his method and the North American rejection of it, and so on, but my kids had mostly been there, done that.
2 cents Canadian -- about a cent and a half US, so the highest value in years!
-David =================================================================== David G. Likely, Department of Psychology University of New Brunswick Fredericton, N. B., Canada E3B 5A3
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