Rousseau Institute

Rousseau Institute (also known as Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute or Academy of Geneva - in French Académie De Genève or Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau) is a private school in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1912, Édouard Claparède (1873-1940) created an institute to turn educational theory into a science. This new institution was given the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom Claparède attributed the "Copernican reversal" of putting the child, rather than the teacher, at the centre of the educational process (cf. Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm shift).

The founder of the Institute appointed as director Pierre Bovet (1878-1965), whom he considered to be both a philosophical and rigorously scientific person. Between 1921 and 1925, Jean Piaget (1896-1980) took over the reins, soon conferring on Genevan experimental psychology its far-reaching renown. It was to Piaget's dismay, however, that his theoretical work was not as successful.