Theories of Childhood, Second Edition (Carol Garhart Mooney) / quote 52 of 70
Disequilibrium and accommodation
Piaget believed that in the preoperational stage, children form ideas from their direct experiences in life. This is why telling children something is less effective than finding a way to help them think their own way through a problem. For example, if a child sees birds fly away when a dog barks, she may decide that barking dogs are the cause of birds’ flight. Even though this is not an accurate idea, the child will be perfectly comfortable with her own reasoning despite any attempt to tell her otherwise. It is only after she has gathered more experience on her own—seeing birds take flight when no dog is around—that she will go through a mental process that challenges her worldview. Piaget calls this process disequilibrium. The child has to change her view and adapt it to her new information. Piaget calls the process of adapting one’s understanding on the basis of new information accommodation. Accommodation returns the child to a more comfortable balanced state that Piaget calls equilibrium.