Folk Knowledge and Academic Learning

Educational Psychology Review

In this article, I examine children's evolved learning mechanisms that make humans the most educable of animals. These include (1) skeletal perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that get fleshed out over the course of development, mainly through play; (2) a high level of plasticity that is greatest early in life but that persists into adulthood; (3) remarkable social-learning capabilities; and (4) dispositions toward exploration and play. I next examine some evolutionary mismatches-conflicts between psychological mechanisms evolved in ancient environments and their utility in modern ones-specifically with respect to modern educational systems. I then suggest some ways educators can take advantage of children's evolved learning abilities to minimize the effects of evolutionary mismatches, including (1) following developmentally appropriate practices (which are also evolutionarily appropriate practices), (2) increasing opportunities for physical activities, (3) increasing opportunities to learn through play, and (4) taking advantage of stress-adapted children's "hidden talents." I argue that evolutionary theory informs teachers and parents about how children evolved to learn and can result in moreenlightened teaching methods that will result in a more enjoyable and successful learning experiences for children.

2002

9 Evolutionary developmental psychology, an emerging subdiscipline of evolutionary approaches to 10 human behavior and cognition, focuses on the adaptive nature of psychological mechanisms built into 11 the brains of juveniles, some of which may serve immediate demands at different stages of 12 development, and some of which serve preparatory roles for maturity. The current article reviews some 13 of the central ideas of evolutionary developmental psychology and investigates how human 14 educability, which is qualitatively different from the learning capacity of other species, is governed by 15 specific adaptations of Homo sapiens’ childhood that serve to orient the young child to his or her 16 cultural environment. Evolutionary developmental psychology, we argue, can be especially 17 informative to educational policy makers who wish to take children’s natural limitations, as well as 18 their intellectual pliability, into account when planning curricula. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc....

2011

Schooling often rests uneasily on presumed dichotomies between coverage and inquiry, skill development, and creativity. By drawing on the often underrecognized parallels between biological evolution and human learning, this essay argues that formal education needs and ought not to forego the unconscious exploratory processes of informal learning. Rather than posit as natural the cultural story that formal schooling must prepare students to integrate with given cultures and foreknowable futures, the evolutionary perspective shows that education is better thought of as preparing students to create cultures and to change, and foster change, in relation to unknown futures. The properties that distinguish formal from informal learning-conscious reflection and a degree of collective consensus about what constitutes knowledge at any given time-are, we argue, useful not as ends in themselves, but as tools for maximizing, sharing, and extending unconscious, evolutionary learning. Working with them as such offers a way out of some of education's persistent problems. Two autobiographical case studies provide examples of these evolutionary changes and indicate pathways of inquiry by which to pursue them.

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this paper I argue that disputes about the nature and prevalence of teaching across human societies and non-human animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields and important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teachingmentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist-and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in human and non-human animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. 39 2012). Much of the knowledge and behavior that allows humans to adapt to a uniquely 40 broad range of ecologies is accumulated over multiple generations, leading to 41 adaptations more complex than any one individual could produce in a lifetime (Boyd & 42 Richerson 1996, Tennie et al. 2009). For example, Oceania was only settled through the 43 combination of sophisticated navigational knowledge, along with complex double-hulled 44 canoes (see Kirch 2002)-and the Arctic could not have been settled without new 45 technologies for clothing and shelter, as well as food-getting techniques (Boyd et al.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011

We propose that the cognitive mechanisms that enable the transmission of cultural knowledge by communication between individuals constitute a system of ‘natural pedagogy’ in humans, and represent an evolutionary adaptation along the hominin lineage. We discuss three kinds of arguments that support this hypothesis. First, natural pedagogy is likely to be human-specific: while social learning and communication are both widespread in non-human animals, we know of no example of social learning by communication in any other species apart from humans. Second, natural pedagogy is universal: despite the huge variability in child-rearing practices, all human cultures rely on communication to transmit to novices a variety of different types of cultural knowledge, including information about artefact kinds, conventional behaviours, arbitrary referential symbols, cognitively opaque skills and know-how embedded in means-end actions. Third, the data available on early hominin technological cultur...

2008

Child Development, 2000

Evolutionary developmental psychology involves the expression of evolved, epigenetic programs, as described by the developmental systems approach, over the course of ontogeny. There have been different selection pressures on organisms at different times in ontogeny, and some characteristics of infants and children were selected in evolution to serve an adaptive function at that time in their life history rather than to prepare individuals for later adulthood. Examples of such adaptive functions of immaturity are provided from infancy, play, and cognitive development. Most evolved psychological mechanisms are proposed to be domain specific in nature and have been identified for various aspects of children's cognitive and social development, most notably for the acquisition of language and for theory of mind. Differences in the quality and quantity of parental investment affect children's development and influence their subsequent reproductive and childcare strategies. Some sex differences observed in childhood, particularly as expressed during play, are seen as antecedents and preparations for adult sex differences. Because evolved mechanisms were adaptive to ancestral environments, they are not always adaptive for contemporary people, and this mismatch of evolved mechanisms with modern environments is seen in children's maladjustment to some aspects of formal schooling. We argue that an evolutionary perspective can be valuable for developing a better understanding of human ontogeny in contemporary society and that a developmental perspective is important for a better understanding of evolutionary psychology.

Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2011

Education is broadly defined as the set of processes by which each generation of human beings acquires the culture in which they grow up. By this definition, education is part and parcel of our biological makeup. An analysis of education in hunter-gatherer bands indicates that young humans are designed, by natural selection, to acquire the culture through their self-directed play and exploration. Research at a modern-day democratic school designed to facilitate self-education demonstrates that our hunter-gatherer educative instincts are quite adequate for education today, given an appropriate educational environment. The ideal environment for such education—found both in hunter-gatherer bands and at the school studied—is one in which young people (a) have unlimited free time and much space in which to play and explore; (b) can mix freely with other children of all ages; (c) have access to a variety of knowledgeable and caring adults; (d) have access to culturally relevant tools and ...

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2003

1986