“Piaget was not an educator and never enunciated rules about how to intervene in such situations. But his work strongly suggests that the automatic reaction of putting the child right may well be abusive. Practicing the art of making theories may be more valuable for children than achieving meteorological orthodoxy. And if their theories are always greeted by “nice try, but this is how it really is…” they might give up after a while on making theories. As Piaget put it: “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.””
Papert, S. (1999) Papert on Piaget. Time magazine’s special issue on “The Century’s Greatest Minds,” page 105, March 29, 1999.