Geneva School (Psychology)

The Geneva School is a tradition in developmental psychology centered on the work of Jean Piaget, who moved to Geneva in 1921 to work with Edouard Claparede at the Rousseau Institute and there developed the study of children's cognitive development through direct observation and clinical interviewing. The school holds that children construct knowledge actively through their own interaction with the environment, passing through a sequence of qualitatively distinct developmental stages rather than simply accumulating information, an approach Piaget termed genetic epistemology. In 1955 Piaget founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva, drawing psychologists and scholars from other disciplines into collaborative research that extended the school's influence well beyond Switzerland.