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evolutionary psychology

What’s the point of school?

2017-03-14T15:58:31+00:00March 14th, 2017|Featured|

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate Schools have only ever existed in cultures where culturally specific knowledge has outpaced universal folk knowledge. What is universal - speech, recognising distinctions between the properties of inanimate objects and plants and animals, cooperating in groups, etc. -  is clearly the result of evolutionary adaptions; if it wasn't it wouldn't be universal. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognise objects or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these things are much [...]

Education isn’t natural – that’s why it’s hard

2023-05-11T11:23:00+01:00February 23rd, 2017|psychology|

One of the most troubling conundrums in the field of education is that the common sense observation that children learn so many things simply by virtue of being immersed in an appropriate environment is contradicted by the overwhelming empirical data that explicit instruction outperforms discovery approaches in schools. Why should this be? Surely if children can learn something as complex as speech without much effort, why do we need to go to the trouble of painstakingly teaching them phoneme/grapheme relationships? It's easy to sympathise with the view that it would be better to just give them some appropriate reading material and [...]

Robots, evolution and why schools shouldn't worry about innate skills

2016-10-13T22:45:49+01:00October 13th, 2016|learning|

It should come as little surprise to hear that some of what human beings can do is innate. That is to say, we are born with various capacities and abilities which appear to be 'hardwired' into our brains. The evolutionary psychologist David Geary talks about such capacities as being either biologically primary or secondary adaptations. Biologically primary adaptations are those that emerge instinctively by virtue of our evolved cognitive structures, whereas biologically secondary adaptations are exclusively cultural, acquired through formal or informal instruction or training. Evolution, through natural selection, has resulted in brains that eagerly and rapidly learn the sorts of things which allow us to [...]

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