Jean Piaget Society
	29th Annual Symposium June 2-5, 1999 Mexico City	29º Simposio Anual del 2 al 5 de junio 1999 México, D.F.

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Some thoughts on why you should attend the 29th Annual Symposium

As you have come to expect, the program of this years' JPS Congress will again make you grow in eight ways. Come and learn, and all of that daunting and sometimes supercilious cross-talk about "Reductionism" will never leave you speechless again. But you expected that. That is why you ordinarily attend, and why you are sorry when you can't. Here, however, is what you don't know, and what needs to count among the good reasons not to be left out of this one.

Picture this. The Museum Antiguo Colegio de San Ildephfonso, the 17th century Jesuit college that will be the principal site of this years' Congress, reduces one to a whisper. The outer door to this ancient enclave closes on a street alive with the bustle of a great city (the largest in the world when Cortés razed it in 1521, and the largest again). Suddenly you are in an oasis of learning so steeped in history and so magisterial that you can not resist the impulse to genuflect in the direction of everything you value about our collective scholarly past. Your eyes trace a central courtyard and the multi-storied ring of arched porticos surrounding you, each framing another panel in the parade of images that make up the long murals of this historic monument. You discover yourself making soft guttural sounds ("oh-ah-oh," you say), and your face hurts from smiling. You stand in the Anfiteatro Simón Bolívar, slated for plenary and other talks, and you take in the Rivera mural that backdrops the podium. You wonder whether what you have to say is important enough for this. Hurrying from there to the adjacent Salón El Generalito (or hall of the Little General) you expect something perhaps less grand. Instead, you are confronted with a 20 foot wainscot of ornately carved chairs, darkly built for a now dead army of former cardinals. The podium is a higher still block of tooled wood, capped by a giant wooden shell meant to project forward the words of a generation less "wired" than our own. Just as you are about to become lost in another era, you notice the closed-circuit TV screen and the banks of facilities used in providing simultaneous translations. Like all of Mexico City, here too, you discover, the modern and ancient worlds come together in style.

Because only part of the more than 220 presentations that make up this years' Congress will comfortably fit within the "Ancient College," you navigate the 300 yards separating it from the nearby Casa de la Primera Imprenta. It's a broken-field run past shops of hanging flowers and sundry things of uncertain use, and you do or don't repress the impulse to play hooky. The First Printing House too is a collage of hand-hewn beams and modern technologies, and you are crestfallen to recall the sterility of the classrooms and offices in which you work "back home."

But it's lunch time and you duck across the street where armies of white-coated waiters help you put the lie to your fast-food fictions about "Mexican food." For the price of a bedraggled Big Mac and fries in Geneva, you choose among the cuisines of the world, all washed down with dangerous quantities of tequila, served six ways till Sunday.

Because there is still time before the next session you return to your hotel. You pick your way past vendors selling everything from CDs to things made of bits of wood and string, and arrive at the Cathedral fronting eight football fields of public square, a kind of Latin American Hyde Park Corner for anyone with a soap box and a cause. You wade through the vendors wondering how it could be that, in a town of international tourism, everyone manages to seem so open-faced and genuinely pleased to see you. Imported worries, triggered by a rumor-mongering North American press, begin to fade. Five minutes and you are at your hotel. Fountains splash, it is dark and quiet, you can barely make out the lobby ceiling six stories above. You open your door. All of the stuff you have come to expect is where you expect it, and you think this: sometime ages and ages hence, when others talk of having been there, I won't have to be one of those desperately struggling to recall the long since forgotten reasons why it was that, in June of 1999, they thought they needed to be elsewhere. Instead, you will say that you met a traveler who, on returning from this antique land, said "don't miss it," and you went.