Why do we need schools? Part 2
Why some things are easy to learn but others are hard
This is the second post in a 4 part series. In Part 1, I began my argument that school is essential because it is our most effective mechanism for transmitting accumulated cultural knowledge. Our brains have evolved alongside culture in a process of gene-culture coevolution, making us biologically adapted to learn from others rather than rediscover everything ourselves. This makes schools vital: they offer structured, equitable access to the shared knowledge of humanity, allowing each generation to build on past discoveries rather than starting from scratch.
Our ancestors needed to find food, avoid danger, mate and ensure their children survived to adulthood. The need to find food selected for minds which could attend to and remember the characteristics and behaviour of plants and animals, the resourcefulness to provide shelter and defend against predators, and the ingenuity to consider how inanimate objects might be used as tools. The ability to compete and cooperate in groups, whether for food gathering or mating opportunities, selected for minds which were able to anticipate the motives and emotions of others, and better communicate needs and ideas. These are the folk disciplines: folk psychology, folk physics and folk biology.
Folk psychology is an interest in people and an awareness of ourselves; folk physics is an interest in movement, tools and time; and folk biology is an interest in plants and animals.
Over the millennia, our minds have adapted to acquiring this folk knowledge quickly and easily. Instinct and learning are often seen as opposites: instinct is genetically determined whereas learning is the product of experience. But it might be better to say that we have an instinct for learning, and learning some things might be more instinctive than learning others. As far back as 1896, James Mark Baldwin struggled with the conundrum of why some things are preprogrammed while others have to be learned. Instincts are hugely time-saving; anything we have to learn for ourselves makes it more difficult for us to survive and reproduce. Baldwin saw that there was a clear limit to the returns of innate abilities and that being able to acquire new knowledge provided more flexible advantages. He concluded that the reason why humans developed intelligence was to enable children “to learn things which natural heredity fails to transmit.”
In ‘Educating the Evolved Mind’, evolutionary psychologist David Geary calls these domains of folk knowledge “biologically primary adaptations”. Such adaptations are universal traits shared by people from all cultures since at least the Upper Palaeolithic period about 40,000 years ago. What is universal is clearly the result of evolutionary adaption; if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be universal. These emergent modules of folk knowledge are so important that they have come to be essentially human characteristics. Every culture possesses language and has easily acquired systems for learning about the natural and social world. These are species-constant, universal inheritances that we can trace back to the first appearance of Homo sapiens. In Baldwin’s terms, we have an evolved instinct for readily acquiring this kind of knowledge.
Geary refers to other branches of knowledge as “biologically secondary”. Where human cultures diverge, so does culturally specific, biologically secondary knowledge. Kevin Laland points out that “Humanity’s success is sometimes attributed to our cleverness, but culture is actually what makes us smart. Intelligence is not irrelevant of course, but what singles out our species is an ability to pool our insights and knowledge and build on each other’s solutions.” As well as ‘hard wiring’ our brains to rapidly and effortlessly learn the folk disciplines, nature has also made use of the brain’s natural plasticity to enable us to learn any cultural innovations which may prove useful to us. This ability to learn is the ultimate ‘good trick’. The trouble is, although we can ‘rewire’ our brains to learn all sorts of new and useful culturally generated knowledge, it doesn’t come nearly as easily as learning what is biologically primary. We tend not to pick up biologically secondary knowledge from the environment, instead requiring some sort of apprenticeship or instruction.
This is in part because we have a motivational bias towards learning such things as peer interaction, play hunting of other species and exploration of the physical environment within the biologically primary domains. So adaptive were these kinds of knowledge that over time we evolved the ability to create symbolic representations of experiences and techniques, like storytelling, to communicate our experiences. The human brain – shaped by evolutionary pressures – is adapted to run off rules of thumb or heuristics such as: ‘Avoid weird-looking food’, ‘Don’t mess about with potential predators’, ‘If someone shares with you, share with them in return’, ‘Smile at strangers to avoid conflict’,1 and so on. We acquire this knowledge rapidly through social learning – Joe ate those red spotted mushrooms and now he’s dead – and generalise it as widely as possible. Most of the time the heuristics we pick up prove very useful.2
The problem is, we increasingly find ourselves in environments that require more abstract thinking and where knowledge from folk domains doesn’t necessarily generalise well to the situations we encounter. For instance, all of our experience tells us that for an object to move with a constant speed we must apply a force to it, otherwise it will slow down. Newton’s second law directly contradicts this – but this is so at odds with what we learn about the world through direct observation that we find it extraordinarily challenging. The probability that children would rediscover this through asocial experimentation is staggeringly small. Indeed, it took thousands of years and an awful lot of giant shoulders for Newton to discover it!
Geary’s big idea might be one of the most useful and important ways of demarcating different categories of knowledge. In this view, everything we store in our brains is either the product of evolved instinctive responses to environmental stimuli or the result of learning, probably through copying. What we learn is then divided into those things we learn easily and rapidly without the need for instruction, and the hard-won discoveries that make up our culturally acquired information about the world and how to get on in it.3
Seeing knowledge as either biologically primary or secondary provides us with a useful framework for deciding what should be covered in a school curriculum. There are reasons to be sceptical of the 21st century skills agenda, but Geary’s theory allows us to add one more: these skills have always been vital for the survival of the species, so much so that we have evolved an enhanced capacity for developing them. They are biologically primary modules. Every child naturally learns to collaborate, solve problems and be creative without the need for explicit instruction. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper said, “All life is problem solving.”
Environmental pressures have shaped our minds to respond to scarcity and threat with solutions. If a food source has dried up, where else should we look? If a new predator arrives, how should we escape? This problem-solving instinct often operates below the level of conscious thought, but sometimes we have to get creative: if in the past you’ve escaped predators by climbing trees, but this one can climb better than you can, what then? This forced us to make tools – at first fire hardened spears, then stone axes, later machine guns – and collaborate. We banded together and fought off threats we couldn’t defeat alone. ‘21st century skills’ would be better thought of as ‘Stone Age skills’.4
With this in mind, we should think very carefully about whether what we are seeking to teach is biologically primary or secondary. If it’s culturally acquired it needs to be taught; if it’s a primary adaptation, then demonstration and coaching is all we need. A major problem with teaching ‘domain-general skills’ is that while they are obviously learnable, they may not be teachable. Time spent teaching children to do things they have already acquired through emulation is time wasted; time that could be better spent either teaching them things they don’t already know or on how to apply primary adaptations within secondary domains.
But using curriculum time to teach biologically primary knowledge is more pernicious than that. Some children may be born with a greater capacity for solving problems and thinking critically than others. These children are lucky. At the same time, some children will possess more (and more useful) knowledge of the world on which to apply these skills. These children will tend to be from more privileged backgrounds. What happens in school matters far less to both these groups of children than it does to the less fortunate and the less advantaged. The killer argument against a curriculum that focuses on 21st century skills – or any other kind of generic competencies – is that it is inherently iniquitous.
That said, we may need to make sure that children’s environments are conducive to acquiring the folk knowledge we all take for granted. Just because we have an evolved predisposition to attend to and rapidly learn this stuff, it doesn’t follow that we will automatically do so. If you spend your formative years locked in a darkened room or raised by wolves, you definitely won’t. Luckily, we’re highly motivated to learn these things and, just so long as we encounter them in our environment, we almost certainly will. This might provide an argument in favour of coaching and modelling approaches in the early years of education to ensure all children are immersed in the kind of environment in which they pick up speech, group cooperation and a sense of self. But if we’re tempted to teach these kinds of things explicitly later on, then we will be wasting our time.
Where we can perhaps salvage the notion of domain-general competencies is in using them to assess the application of knowledge within different subjects. If we agree that it’s useful to solve problems within mathematics, to be creative in science, to think critically in history and to collaborate in languages, then we can both teach children how to use their subject knowledge in these ways and then use these competencies as a means to assess how well this is done. Dylan Wiliam suggests that 21st century skills are “best thought of as a way of ensuring that our standards are sufficiently broad”.
Evolutionary psychology not only provides convincing arguments against a curriculum based around developing general competencies, it also tells us something important about why schools exist.
In the Part 3 of this series I will address the evolution of schools and discuss why they are such remarkably resilient organisations.
For instance, it’s been speculated that the reason babies are disproportionately likely to smile at strange men is to counter the threat of infanticide. In our more primitive past, unrelated males were one of the biggest threats to babies’ survival, so it makes excellent evolutionary sense to make yourself as cute as possible.
There is another perspective on heuristics. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s research reveals that humans often make decisions using mental shortcuts that, while efficient, can lead to systematic biases. They identified key heuristics such as the availability heuristic (judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind), the representativeness heuristic (basing judgments on stereotypes rather than statistics), and anchoring (relying too heavily on initial information). Their work challenged the notion of humans as rational decision-makers and laid the foundation for behavioural economics, transforming our understanding of judgment and decision-making.
Geary’s theory provides a model, not an accurate description of reality. All models are, of course, necessary simplifications of the word and are, therefore, wrong. However, as mathematician George Box said, “All Models are wrong, but some are useful.” This is, in my view, a very useful model for understanding our motivational biases.
This is not an established fact and there are many criticisms of ‘just so stories’ resulting from evolutionary psychology. For an overview see Paul Howard-Jones, Evolution of the Learning Brain: Or How You Got To Be So Smart