Evolution and Learning

Why do we need school? Are there things that can’t just be caught, but have to be taught? At an early age children seem to effortlessly learn how to understand and speak a language, recognize faces, and pick up stuff from older folks around them (some of which we’d rather they didn’t learn). But there are some things that are not learned readily without teaching: reading, writing, and mathematics. Schooling is required for these. By schooling, I’m not referring to a particular type of institution setup, but rather explicit teaching needs to take place from “teacher” to pupil. The teacher may be a parent, sibling, formal schoolteacher, friend, or possibly even Sesame Street on TV.

In Educating the Evolved Mind: Conceptual Foundations for an Evolutionary Educational Psychology, David Geary sets up an important categorization. (The chapter/article is 100 pages long including references and was well worth my reading time.) There are two domains of knowledge: Biologically Primary and Biologically Secondary. The human brain is evolutionarily primed to learn the first – and this is the seemingly effortless learning that is “caught”. On the other hand, culture-specific skills (including reading, writing and arithmetic), have to be “taught”. In the first paragraph of his article, Geary sets up the stakes. (See original article for the references.)

“It is widely accepted that all children in modern societies will receive formal and extended instruction in a variety of core domains, such as mathematics, and at the very least they will acquire the basic skills, as in being able to read and write, necessary for employment and day-to-day living in these societies. Unfortunately, the instructional approaches used to achieve these goals and in fact the details of the goals themselves are points of continued and often divisive debate… At one extreme is a child-centered approach, whereby adults should come to understand how children learn and then construct educational goals and instructional methods around children’s learning biases. At the other extreme is the assumption that adults should decide the content to be taught in schools… and the methods by which this content is taught should be based on experimental studies of learning, often without much consideration of children’s preferences. In addition to this lack of consensus about how to approach children’s learning, educational goals can be further complicated by attempts to use schools to socialize children in one ideological perspective or another.”

Geary’s theoretical framework helped me on the one hand to puzzle out why the Michel Thomas method exists, and to understand a bit better Frank Smith’s diatribe in the Book of Learning and Forgetting. On the other hand, it fits well with my struggles teaching chemistry as I have been thinking about the cognitive load imposed on students, and how I can potentially restructure the subject matter to avoid persistent confusion.

Thinking about brain development evolutionarily is key. According to Geary: “Biologically primary domains encompass evolutionary-significant content areas and are composed of folk knowledge (e.g., inferential biases) and primary abilities (e.g. language, spatial). Folk knowledge results from the organization of the brain systems that have evolved to process and integrate specific forms of information.” Geary goes into great detail explaining this in terms of how our brain, perception and attention can be connected to survival-reproductive evolutionary behavior. There are three categories of folk knowledge: Psychology, Biology and Physics. The first relates to processing social information, while the latter two relate to processing ecological information about how nature behaves – from both the living and non-living entities. As a chemist whose interests also span biology and physics, these latter categories are of particular interest.

What distinguishes folk biology and folk physics from the science one might learn in school is that evolution shapes heuristics to be used in a given situation. Geary writes: “These biases may often provide good enough explanations for day-to-day living and self-serving explanations for social and other phenomena… but many of these explanations and attributional biases are scientifically inaccurate and may actually interfere with the learning of scientific concepts…”

The concepts of modern science are in the biologically secondary domain of knowledge. However, they initially emerge and are built from biologically primary domain folk knowledge. Geary argues that advances in science and technology that allow “better control of ecologies… are likely to be retained across generations as cultural artifacts (e.g. books) and traditions (e.g. apprenticeships).” So why do we need schooling? Geary argues that schools arose to bridge the growing gap “between folk knowledge and the competencies needed for living in [modern] society.”

Okay, so perhaps we need some sort of schooling to survive and perhaps thrive in modern society. Why is there still divisive debate about how best to set up schooling? Learning and teaching in this secondary domain is challenging. Geary has a list of principles in Table 1 of the article. Here are the last two. “Children’s inherent motivational bias to engage in activities that will adapt folk knowledge to local conditions will often conflict with the need to engage in activities that will result in secondary learning. The need for explicit instruction will be a direct function of the degree to which the secondary competency differs from the supporting primary systems.”

And amazingly modern technology, thanks to what we’ve learned from cognitive psychology, is attuned to distracting us from learning and schooling. I will be learning more about this next week when I start reading The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. I just got my copy of the book last week and it was autographed by one of the authors who was present at the time! I expect to blog about it later this month so stay tuned.