Why do we need schools? Part 4

Is teaching natural?

In the preceding posts in this series I’ve argued that schools exist because much of what we need to know in the modern world is not biologically hardwired and is not learned instinctively. Unlike skills such as walking or speaking, these forms of culturally specific, biologically secondary knowledge require explicit instruction to master. While schools may appear to be designed institutions, they more likely evolved naturally as the most efficient way to transmit this complex knowledge. From ancient Sumerian scribal schools to today’s classrooms, the core function of schooling has remained consistent: to pass on the accumulated wisdom of our culture. Despite constant calls for innovation, the enduring form of the school reflects a deeper truth: our brains haven’t changed, and neither has the basic nature of learning. In this final post we will consider that teaching itself is an evolved skill, deployed for important cultural purposes in schools.

Part 1: Why our minds are the way they are

Part 2: Why some things are easy to learn but others are hard

Part 3: The evolution of school

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Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Francis Crick

Psychologists call the ability to infer how other people think and feel ‘theory of mind’. Theory of mind enables us to make sense of what oth­ers do and predict what they’re likely to do next by inferring the mental states which cause that behaviour. If someone smiles at us we infer they have friendly intentions. If they clear their throat we infer that they want to speak. If they glare murderously at us we run away. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this the “intentional stance” – understanding that other people’s actions are goal-directed and arise from their beliefs or desires. From his studies of imitation in infants, Andrew Meltzoff has argued that theory of mind is an innate understanding that others are ‘like me,’ allowing us to recognise the physical and mental states appar­ent in others by relating them to our own actions, thoughts and feelings.

Sidney Strauss and colleagues have proposed that theory of mind is an important prerequisite for teaching. Although a few other animals (e.g. meerkats¹) appear to engage in limited teaching activities, as far as we know only humans teach using the ability to anticipate the mental states of the individual being taught. As evidence that teaching is an innate ability, they point to the fact that the ability to teach arises spontaneously at an early age without any apparent instruction and that it is common to all human cultures. Teaching, despite its complexity, evolved alongside our ability to learn.

In one study, preschool children were shown how to play a board game. Strauss and his team then observed the children’s behaviour when teach­ing others and witnessed a range of teaching strategies being deployed, including demonstration (actively showing the learner what to do), specific directions, verbal explanations, questions aimed at checking learners’ understanding, explicit reference to the act of teaching (“I will now explain to you how to play”) and instances of teachers responding to utterance and actions of learners.

Teaching ability doesn’t appear to improve all that much with matura­tion; thus, compared to 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds relied more on verbal explanations, were more responsive to the learners’ difficulties and asked questions aimed at checking the learners’ understanding. Still, this is somewhat alarming as it suggests that much of what teacher training and professional development consists of are competencies possessed by the average 5-year-old! Maybe the only real difference between qualified teachers and most 5-year-olds is our subject knowledge.

In The Orator’s Education, the Roman writer Quintilian set out peda­gogic practices that we would still recognise and approve of today. Not only did he prefer classrooms to private tuition, he also argued that stu­dents required persistence, practice and an expert teacher to guide them. While he believed that students possessed natural inclinations to reason and remember, he saw knowledge – particularly the knowledge required to be an orator – as something students must make an effort to learn. He even used guides to help students learn to write by tracing letters.32 If teaching is a biologically primary skill, it goes a long way to explain­ing why classroom practices have been so remarkably persistent over the generations: the way we teach is an evolutionary adaption that has devel­oped as being an efficient, effective way to transmit culturally specific knowledge. Why would we want to reinvent this particular wheel?

This is the lure of the new – the idea that the future should be shiny, dif­ferent and, preferably, sciency. We have developed a tendency to believe that what is old is outdated and needs to be replaced. This wasn’t always the case. Previous generations had more of a ‘make do and mend’ mental­ity, but today we’re used to built in obsolescence and crave new laptops and phones every year. Gimmicks come and go, fads pass, but the Lindy effect predicts that what has worked for the entirety of human history will, in all probability, still work in the 21st (and 22nd) century.

That said, it takes biologically secondary knowledge to teach biologically secondary knowledge. While the act of teaching may well be an evolu­tionary adaptation, what we teach is not (or at least not directly). Rather neatly, it would seem that nature has equipped us to find it relatively easy to learn how to teach things to others that they would otherwise find hard to learn. The fact that schools were invented to transmit this hard to learn stuff provides some clear clues about how to teach. If biologically secondary knowledge is difficult to master, the aim of teaching should be to make this process as straightforward and clear as possible.

As well as suggesting the degree to which we should be explicit in our instruction, David Geary’s theory [always makes me chuckle] also tells us something important about motivation. As previously noted, we are inherently motivated to learn knowledge that has an obvious evolutionary advantage. Few children have to be persuaded to socialise or mess about with objects – the ten­dency is part of being human. Similarly, few children are motivated to put in the effort required to learn algebra without direction. Our brains – so well adapted for learning biologically primary knowledge – have been unceremoniously co-opted for the purposes of learning culturally acquired knowledge. As information diverges from its folk knowledge base, it becomes increasingly harder for us to wrap our heads around it. We easily fall prey to naive misconceptions and get frustrated at the tedious practice needed to master abstract secondary knowledge. This is why schools need rules and well-administered behaviour systems; without these things, children – especially teenagers – are likely to drift off into those activities which come more naturally and induce more pleasure, such as chatting, twanging rulers, looking at cat memes on the internet and trying to get off with each other.

Learning to read, or learning mathematics are not natural human activi­ties, in the sense that these technologies have been around for such a short time that evolution through natural selection hasn’t had enough of a chance to shape our brains to learn them easily. As a result, such things typically require much more effort to master. The purpose of schools, as much as anything else, is to provide an environment where children are made to attend to what they would otherwise prefer to avoid.

Evolution has shaped every facet of our brains, finely tuning them to the demands of survival and social living. Over time, our genes have co-evolved with culture, accelerating our capacity to learn certain types of information, particularly those that offer a clear evolutionary advantage. These are known as biologically primary adaptations: skills like language, social interaction, and physical coordination that we pick up with ease and motivation. In contrast, abstract, culturally specific knowledge - such as reading, mathematics, and science - is biologically secondary. It does not come naturally, is less intrinsically motivating, and requires formal instruction to master. This is why schools exist: to explicitly teach the kinds of knowledge we are not biologically inclined to acquire on our own. Yet, while the content of education may be secondary, the act of teaching itself appears to be biologically primary, an evolved skill rooted in our ability to understand others’ minds. This insight should caution us against hastily reinventing teaching based on passing trends; instead, it suggests that the most effective forms of instruction may already lie deep within our evolutionary design.

This challenges the notion that education must constantly innovate for innovation’s sake; instead, it highlights that traditional classroom practices may persist not due to conservatism but because they align with how humans are cognitively wired to learn and teach. In a world increasingly enamoured with the new, we would do well to remember that the most effective structures for educating the next generation may already be built into us.

1. Meerkats teach their young how to handle dangerous prey, like scorpions, through a step-by-step process. Adults first provide dead or disabled prey, then gradually offer live ones as pups gain skill. This behavior shows active teaching: adults modify their actions to help pups learn, even at a short-term cost to themselves.