Why do we need schools? Part 1

Why our brains are the way they are

This is the first of a four part series laying out an argument as to why schools are important.

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To understand why we need schools, we must first understand what it means to be human. Our species has been shaped by millions of years of evolution, not just through the slow march of genetic selection, but also through the rapid, transformative force of culture. Unlike any other species, we have survived and thrived not because of strength or speed, but because of our ability to learn from one another. Cultural innovations have been passed down through generations via a process of social learning. Our brains have evolved not to rediscover the world anew, but to benefit from what others have already figured out. This is where schools come in. Schools are not just buildings where children are kept busy; they are humanity’s most powerful tool for transmitting cultural knowledge quickly, efficiently, and equitably. In a world where the pace of cultural and technological change vastly outstrips the speed of biological evolution, schools are essential for ensuring that each generation inherits, understands, and builds upon the knowledge of the past. Without them, we risk forcing each child to start from scratch in a world that’s far too complex, far too unforgiving, for such inefficiency.

In order to comprehend ourselves we need to know that we have been forged in the crucible of natural selection. In our distant past, we naked apes had few advantages beyond our big brains and opposable thumbs. In order to survive we needed to band together with other members of our species and share any useful survival tricks we came up with. These ‘good tricks’ were collected, refined and passed down the generations, forming the basis of human culture.¹

It’s tempting to view culture – “the extensive accumulation of shared learned knowledge and its iterative improvements over time”² – as that which sets human beings apart from all other species. While a few other species make very limited use of tools, we have invented smart phones, 3D printers and the Large Hadron Collider. But our capacity for culture must also have evolutionary roots. And it does. The evolution of culture took place side by side with the evolution of our genes. In fact, who we are and how our brains work is the result of two and half million years of gene-culture coevolution. The evolution of genes is painfully slow, yet culture can evolve incredibly rapidly and have the effect of galvanising the selection process on genes, resulting in far faster biological innovation. (One of the most well-known examples is the evolutionary relationship between the genetics of lactose tolerance in humans and the cultural habit of dairy farming.³) This time period saw a quadrupling in size of the human brain,⁴ unprecedented changes in human gene expression,⁵ and archaeological finds detailing bewilderingly rapid progress in the complexity and diversity of our technology and knowledge base.⁶ Our reliance on each other and the tools we have designed to assist us in our efforts to stay alive have shaped our brains. In the words of evolutionary biologist Kevin Laland, “Human minds are not just built for culture; they are built by culture.” But what we’ve ended up with is just good enough to survive and reproduce; in essential ways, our brains are the same as those of our Palaeolithic ancestors.

When we think about how and what to teach, we should consider the role of evolution in shaping the way humans have adapted to think and learn. In our distant past, learning was a costly strategy – time spent learning was time we couldn’t spend surviving and reproducing – so it makes sense that we have evolved to learn as efficiently as possible. Evolutionary biologists think of learning as being either social or aso­cial. Social learning is essentially copying (what’s everyone else doing?), whereas asocial learning is accrued by interacting with the environment through trial and error. Everything we know is either learned socially or asocially, through mimicry or experimentation, emulation or innovation.

Both types of learning have associated advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of asocial learning is that you get accurate, up-to-date, first-hand information about what works and what doesn’t, but the cost is high. You could waste hours on strategies that barely work—or worse, you might end up dead after eating a suspiciously funky mushroom, tumbling off a cliff in pursuit of some gourmet berries, or getting mugged by something with claws and a bad attitude.

The advantage of social learning is that it’s easier, safer and more likely to result in productive survival strategies. Human beings, like many other species, operate in groups, and so copying the behaviour that others – especially those in your kinship group – have adopted seems a sensible strategy. After all, if everyone around you is getting on well, why would you risk trying something different? Copying something badly means you are less likely to survive and reproduce than those who copy things well, and so being good at copying is selected for. The downside to relying on other people’s experiences of what’s most likely to be effective means that we might not understand why we do what we do. When environmental conditions change rapidly or a new predator is introduced, old strategies may prove ineffective and those who can adapt the quickest are those who will survive.

It used to be believed that the numbers of social to asocial learners in a group would be fairly evenly balanced – that environmental change would favour asocial learning, whereas stability would favour social learning – but it turns out that social learning forms the basis for the remarkable growth and success of human culture.⁷ This might seem counter-intuitive: surely, new innovations gleaned from asocial tinkering must be the most important driving force in human ingenuity? The thing is, although we need a minimal amount of asocial learning, most people get on most of the time purely using socially learned strategies, and that’s because we copy strategically. Only the most successful ideas get passed on and spread throughout the group. Each new generation hones in on optimal solutions, so as long as there’s a little bit of experimentation going on – either through asocial learning or through copying errors – culture accumulates and is continually refined. This is essentially what Richard Dawkins referred to as mimetic reproduction.

In the modern world, we support a very small number of people – sci­entists, artists and the like – that they may spend a fraction of their time on asocial learning. The rest of us spend our lives directly copying those around us or accessing the vast accumulation of human culture through word of mouth, books, the internet and now, GenAI. Pretty much every moment of every day is spent engaged in tasks which are directly or indirectly copied. As the Bible tells us, “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” If we choose to engage in a brief bout of asocial learning, we do it for fun and because we’re safe enough not to worry about it going too far wrong.

Obviously, when the zombie apocalypse comes, asocial learners will be in much demand; those who work out how to survive in the new paradigm fastest will have an enormous advantage over the rest of us. But then, if humanity is to survive, it will be because we copy the new ‘good tricks’ they come up with and begin the fight back against the undead.

So, what does all of this have to do with education? Simply this: while we might all enjoy a small amount of asocial experimentation, almost everything we learn – and almost certainly everything useful – will be due to our ability to observe and emulate. A school curriculum that favours a trial and error approach to reacquiring what has previously been discovered as the result of several millennia of iterative copying is fighting against biology. We’re just not fitted to learn that way. Even Jerome Bruner, a champion of the discovery learning cause, could see that existing knowledge and culture were not generally passed on by dis­covery. He wrote:

You cannot consider education without taking into account how cul­ture gets passed on. It seems to me highly unlikely that given the cen­trality of culture in man’s adaptation to his environment – the fact that culture serves him in the same way as changes in morphology served earlier in the evolutionary scale – that, biologically speaking, one would expect each organism to rediscover the totality of its culture – this would seem most unlikely.

Jerome S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction

By far the most effective way to pass on the fruits of human culture is to share what has already been discovered and invented as clearly and as explicitly as we can.

This gets to the heart of what we believe schools are for. Should they be safe spaces in which we allow children to tinker about at the margins of human culture, maybe discovering something useful for themselves? Or are they, as education professor Michael Young has said, places that should “enable young people to acquire the knowledge that, for most of them, cannot be acquired at home or in the community”⁸ The first choice is a Darwinian jungle in which those fortunate enough to have wealthy, educated parents will thrive and the devil take the hindmost. If you believe in social justice and giving children a fair chance to escape the constraints of this lottery, using schools to promote effective social learn­ing is the only option.

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Part 2 discusses why we find some things more difficult to learn than others. Part 3 will trace the origins and development of schools, and the final part will consider the extent that teaching itself is an evolutionary adaptation.

1. In Daniel Dennett's writing, a ‘good trick’ or ‘crane’ refers to a process or mechanism that builds upon existing knowledge and principles to achieve a complex outcome, rather than resorting to a simplistic or magical explanation (a "skyhook"). Dennett uses the analogy of a construction crane to illustrate this point, emphasising that true design and understanding often come from building upon what is already known, rather than inventing something entirely new. See Intuition Pumps for more.

2. Kevin N. Laland, Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 7.

3. Beja-Pereira et al (2003) provides evidence for gene-culture coevolution between humans and domesticated cattle. The researchers found a strong correlation between the spread of cattle domestication and the evolution of lactase persistence in humans—the genetic ability to digest lactose into adulthood. Specifically, in populations with a long history of dairy farming, there was a higher frequency of lactase-persistence genes, suggesting that cultural practices like milk consumption directly influenced human genetic evolution. This study is a key example of how human culture can shape biology.

4. Cáceres et al (2003) compared gene expression in human and non-human primate brains and found that humans show significantly elevated levels of gene expression, particularly in the cerebral cortex. These differences suggest that regulatory changes in gene expression, rather than changes to the genes themselves, play a key role in what makes the human brain unique. The findings support the idea that enhanced cognitive abilities in humans are partly due to increased activity in specific brain-related genes, highlighting a major biological distinction between humans and our closest evolutionary relatives.

5. Enquist et al (2011) explore why human culture grows at an exponential rate and how it evolves over time. They argue that cumulative culture—the process by which knowledge and skills build across generations—is driven by social learning combined with innovation. Using mathematical models, they show that as populations grow and social learning becomes more efficient, the rate of cultural accumulation accelerates. This feedback loop helps explain the increasing complexity and diversity of human culture, suggesting that the more culture we have, the faster it grows.

6. Barrett, Kurian and Todd (2001) is a comprehensive global survey of Christianity and other world religions. It provides detailed statistical data and analysis on the size, distribution, growth rates, and demographics of religious groups across countries and regions. Covering both historical trends and modern developments, the encyclopedia aims to document the diversity and global reach of religious belief, particularly focusing on the expansion and variation of Christian denominations worldwide.

7. Studies by Boyd, Richerson Henrich (2011), Tomasello et al (2015) and Henrich & McElreath (2003) demonstrate that humans are uniquely adapted for high-fidelity imitation, teaching, and shared intentionality—traits that allow us to build on others’ knowledge rather than start from scratch. This capacity for cumulative cultural evolution (where each generation improves on the last) relies on social learning to transmit complex skills and ideas. Asocial learning still plays a role, particularly in innovation, but it’s the strategic copying of successful behaviours that makes human culture so resilient and advanced.

8. Michael Young, What Are Schools For? (2011) argues that the primary purpose of schools is to provide access to powerful knowledge, specialised, systematic knowledge that students are unlikely to acquire through everyday experience. He challenges the idea that education should focus solely on skills or relevance to students’ lives, insisting instead that schools have a vital role in bridging the gap between everyday knowledge and disciplinary understanding. Young contends that a focus on powerful knowledge is essential for promoting social justice, as it ensures that all students, regardless of background, have the opportunity to engage with the intellectual resources that shape society.