Those people familiar with the Initiative’s work, and in particular with the book The Unfinished Revolution, will know that we have been struggling to understand what significance, if any, a better appreciation of the evolutionary sciences may have for those wanting to improve children’s learning. We’ve charted this path even though some have warned us away: “We already have a science of learning,” one of our friends argued. He despaired for us, “Why do you need to get into the contentious area of evolution.”

In the autumn of 1999 we wrote an article detailing the biological roots of learning for a well-known American educational journal. In reading the draft a colleague working on her Ph.D. at a leading American university suggested we not use the words ‘evolution’ or ‘inherited predispositions’ because fully half of all Americans believed the biblical account of creation. Additionally, our friend noted, “the Kansas School Board has just dropped the subject of evolution from the official curriculum in biology altogether. Why do you want to make it even harder for you to have your voices heard?”

Since the summer of 1999 we have read a number of books that have strengthened our resolve. As the Stanford Professor of Biology Paul Ehrlich notes in his book Human Natures, “Evolution is the explanatory principle that connects all biological phenomena into a seamless whole; as the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky put it, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” And human learning is, we argue, certainly, ‘in biology.’

So what can evolutionary studies really tell us about learning that matters?

It can tell us quite a bit, or at least point us in the right direction and help us avoid pitfalls, but the exploration into the literature on the biological roots of human behavior must be carried out at all times with a critical eye. If the effort is to lead to any meaningful results it is important to seek out those areas of general consensus, and to wait out those areas of greatest debate. It is also of central importance to maintain a balance between the new insights emerging from science and the values we hold dear for our children. As the neurobiologist Kenan Malik notes, “Science does not stand impassively above the hurly-burly of everyday life. It is part of that hurly-burly, helping create it, and drawing sustenance from it. To explore how science constructs the idea of what a human is and what it can do, we need also to explore the ways in which the idea of humanness is made meaningful by the culture that scientists inhabit.”

Despite the dissonance, a central point of interest that repeatedly emerges from the sources we have studied is that the human brain has evolved to be the world’s, and quite possibly the universe’s, ultimate learning apparatus. The brain’s impulse to learn is our species defining characteristic. According to Professors Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl the research into children’s learning “suggests that our unique evolutionary trick, our central adaptation, our greatest weapon in the struggle for survival, is precisely our dazzling ability to learn when we are babies and to teach when we are grown-ups.” We are born to learn.

However, this learning gift has not come from our evolutionary past cost free. According to Robert McElvaine, “The human infant may be the most dependent creature on the planet. Paradoxically, the long infant dependence helps to provide humans with the means of achieving a degree of self-sufficiency in adulthood.” Curtis, Swisher and Lewin add, “Birth is a hazardous time for all mammalsÉ(but) for humans, birth is doubly dangerous. First, our enlarged brain makes birthing itself especially hazardous; the percentage of babies who become stuck or brain-damaged during delivery is far higher than in other species. Second,” they note, “the amount of brain growth that is required after birth is far greater than in other species, so that human neonates are particularly helpless, and require extensive nurturing and protection. The flip side of that nurturing overload – extended childhood, as it is known – is that it is an opportunity for learning social and practical skills before the individual has to make his or her way in the world.”

In order to achieve the more than tripling in brain size that occurs after birth, evolution had to come up with a few tricks. One was to maintain the high fetal rate of brain growth during the first year of life; effectively, therefore, human gestation is 21 months, not the nine that go on inside the womb. Another was the elaboration of social cooperation required to sustain an extended childhood. And a third was a set of predispositions for learning, among others, language and social skills. We excel at learning because we are a social animal par excellence. Human survival has been almost totally dependent on relationships with other people, and this has meant we have had to learn to deal with each other. Faced with a hostile environment, our Stone Age ancestors banded together to achieve as a group what they could not do alone. But, they cooperated with one another in relatively small groups. For McElvaine this means, “There is no choice between self and society. The two are reciprocal. One cannot properly exist without the other.”

Humans are Small-Group Animals

Paul Ehrlich thinks the most important evolutionary lessons relate to our long history as a small-group animal. He writes, “The evidence seems strong that the unique features of our brains evolved in large part to solve the problems of living and communicating in small communities of clever companions.” He continues, “Only recently in evolutionary time – a matter of a few hundred generations at most – has the opportunity even existed for interacting closely with more people than one would find living in a small village or employed in a small business. Most people, indeed, still have as friends and acquaintances a group of the same size (on the order of 150) as many hunter-gatherer bands. We still seem to bear many other traces of our small-group, gossiping-and-grooming past. Indeed, one study showed that about two-thirds of the conversation at a university refectory was basically gossip.” Ehrlich contends that there are many consequences of our having evolved as a small-group animal and relatively suddenly having shifted to living in very large groups. No doubt, education has a role to play in helping children go beyond what comes naturally.

From this perspective one can argue for smaller class sizes, but even more significantly may be the case for smaller schools. From this perspective it is not surprising that smaller schools in the United States are demonstrating better results, and small size facilitates a school’s ability to reform. According to a recent report on “School Size Counts,” the author claims, “Small schools resemble communities rather than bureaucracies.” This issue of communities rather than bureaucracies is an important one. Until the last 150 years humans learned within a community through a process known as apprenticeship, but this was steadily replaced by the needs of industrialization. Industrialization facilitated large factories and large cities, and not surprisingly, it spawned factory schooling. To function efficiently large schools and massive school systems require large and impersonal bureaucracies.

This bureaucratization of learning has come at the expense of the natural learning connections made between adults and children in ordinary everyday family and community life. According to Ehrlich, “In the case of bureaucracy, the goal is putatively to eliminate favoritism, nepotism, love, hatred, and other ‘emotional’ elements in human relationships – that is, to remove much of their humanity and put machine-like standardization in their place.” It would be a cruel paradox that if in our efforts to create a more equal and just society we have unintentionally created learning environments that go against the natural strengths of many children.

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