Evolutionary Developmental Psychology

Education

The high-fidelity transmission of information from one generation to the next is the hallmark of human culture and attributable to the educability of Homo sapiens. Although education is not a modern invention, formal education, performed “out of context” and often in large groups lead by adults unrelated to children, is an evolutionarily novel enterprise. Moreover, many of the technological skills that today's children must learn, such as reading and mathematics, would have been foreign to our ancestors only 10,000 years ago. These skills are what Geary (1995) has referred to as “biologically secondary abilities,” which are recent cultural inventions requiring practice and external motivation to acquire. These are contrasted with “biologically primary abilities,” which have been shaped by evolution and are typically acquired without extensive practice and external motivation, such as language and the counting of small quantities. Given that much of what children need to learn in contemporary societies is evolutionarily novel, it is not surprising that many children find school overly challenging.

Application

Formal schooling, though necessary for success for contemporary people, is an “unnatural” experience (Bjorklund & Bering, 2002). Knowing this, school curricula and environments can be constructed to take advantage of children's natural proclivities to make the task of learning biologically secondary abilities easier. For example, physical activity is important to children, and research has shown that children who are given recess breaks in which to exercise show more on-task behavior and less “fidgeting” than children not given recess (e.g., Jarrett et al., 1998; Pellegrini, Huberty, & Jones, 1995). Other research has suggested that formal instruction for middle-class preschool children provides no academic benefit relative to more play-oriented instruction and may, in fact, lead to higher levels of test anxiety and less positive attitudes toward school (Hyson, Hirsh-Pasek, & Rescorla, 1990).

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