"The more the schemata are differentiated, the smaller the gap between the new and the familiar becomes, so that novelty, instead of constituting an annoyance avoided by the subject, becomes a problem and invites searching"
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Piaget is quietly arguing that curiosity isn’t a personality trait so much as an infrastructure project. The mind that has built more internal “schemata” - those organizing templates for how the world works - doesn’t just know more. It experiences change differently. When your categories are crude, anything unfamiliar hits like a siren: noise, threat, the kind of novelty you swat away to restore equilibrium. But as your mental map gains detail, the unknown stops feeling like a foreign country and starts looking like an unmapped neighborhood. The distance between “what I’ve seen” and “what I’m seeing” shrinks.
That’s the subtext: expertise doesn’t eliminate surprise; it domesticates it. Piaget flips the usual story where learning happens because we encounter something new. Here, the capacity to learn is what makes the new tolerable, even enticing. Novelty becomes “a problem” - not in the everyday sense of hassle, but in the technical sense of a puzzle the organism is now equipped to work on. It “invites searching” because the mind can sense there’s a fit to be found, a tweak or expansion that will integrate the anomaly.
Context matters. Piaget’s developmental psychology is obsessed with how children move from blunt, rigid models of reality to flexible, differentiated ones. He’s also pushing back against the idea of learning as simple absorption. Growth is active: the subject doesn’t accept the world; it interrogates it. The line reads like a diagnosis of why boredom and intellectual vitality cluster where they do - not in the stimuli, but in the architecture meeting them.
That’s the subtext: expertise doesn’t eliminate surprise; it domesticates it. Piaget flips the usual story where learning happens because we encounter something new. Here, the capacity to learn is what makes the new tolerable, even enticing. Novelty becomes “a problem” - not in the everyday sense of hassle, but in the technical sense of a puzzle the organism is now equipped to work on. It “invites searching” because the mind can sense there’s a fit to be found, a tweak or expansion that will integrate the anomaly.
Context matters. Piaget’s developmental psychology is obsessed with how children move from blunt, rigid models of reality to flexible, differentiated ones. He’s also pushing back against the idea of learning as simple absorption. Growth is active: the subject doesn’t accept the world; it interrogates it. The line reads like a diagnosis of why boredom and intellectual vitality cluster where they do - not in the stimuli, but in the architecture meeting them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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