“When Jean Piaget lectured in the United States, he was frequently asked whether the rate at which children attained his cognitive stages could be accelerated – in other words, whether you could train your child to be “ahead” of other children. Piaget was bewildered by the question. In his view of development, being “ahead” or “behind” anyone else was meaningless. But he got the question often enough that he came to associate it with a particular worldview: he called it “the American Question.”
