Education Quote by Jean Piaget

Piaget is quietly dragging common sense: we think we know ourselves best because we live “inside” our heads, yet our first real knowledge is brutally outward-facing, built through use. His phrasing makes it tactile. “Immediate utilisation of things” is not poetic window-dressing; it’s a developmental claim. Before a child can narrate an identity, they can grasp, drop, stack, mouth, throw. The world shows up as a set of resistances and affordances. It answers back. That feedback loop - action, consequence, adjustment - is why external knowledge can start early and look surprisingly sturdy.

Self-knowledge, by contrast, gets “stopped” by the very mechanism that jumpstarts our understanding of objects: practical contact. When your relationship to experience is primarily instrumental (What can I do with this? What does this get me?), the self becomes a tool, too - a bundle of roles and tactics optimized for getting through the day. That’s not introspection; it’s management. Piaget’s subtext is almost a rebuke to adult confidence: the utilitarian mindset that makes us competent in the world can flatten the inner one, turning feelings and motives into afterthoughts or justifications.

Context matters: Piaget is writing out of a tradition that treats intelligence as constructed, not received. The quote sits inside his larger project of explaining how thinking emerges from sensorimotor engagement and only later becomes reflective. It also lands as a critique of modern life: a culture trained to treat everything as a means will produce fluent operators of the world who remain, in a profound sense, strangers to themselves.