Image: Michael Hitoshi Getty Images (forest background); Dori O'Connell Getty Images (child)
In Brief
- Understanding how the brain evolved can help us comprehend why children may struggle to learn in school.
- Natural selection biased human minds over thousands of generations to attend automatically to some features of the social and ecological environment before others.
- Only with effort can we override our automatic learning systems to tackle new challenges, such as those we face in school.
As children settle into their classrooms for the beginning of a new school year, parents steel themselves for the pending battle. Mothers and fathers know well that their youngsters would rather pay attention to one another than to the blackboard. But parents may not realize that the reasons children struggle with education lie deep in our evolutionary past.
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection provides a framework for organizing and understanding all living things. How we learn—and what we are interested in learning about—is also shaped by natural selection. Most demands of life are relatively mundane and change little across the millennia. Our minds have evolved to handle these predictable bits of information with ease. Dramatic variation, such as an outbreak of disease or war, brings unexpected challenges and can have a disproportionate influence on our survival. Those who can deftly solve problems to survive such fluctuating circumstances gain an edge.
This article was originally published with the title Primal Brain in the Modern Classroom.
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7 Comments
Add CommentChildren learn better in an outside environment; boys in an open, fight or flight, environment and girls in a protected, open cave, environment. A boy can learn physics easier and quicker if he is hunkered down in a blind looking for prey; a girl can learn physics easier and faster if she is hunkered down in a cave watching for predators, and both groups must be allowed to move about freely in the cave and in the blind and through the woods covered with leaves whenever they want. Both children will increase their learning abilities if they are allowed to play and frolic in the autumn leaves every day deep in the woods, no matter the weather conditions- if they so choose.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you do not believe this is so; test prekindergarten - equal number of boys and girls of the same age, then for one year, take half of both male and female outside, no matter the weather conditions, provide them their prospective environments, as described above, and teach them as you normally would (iPads work better than books), and after one year retest them and compare their tests to the half of prekindergarten boys and girls that spent their learning in the normal modern school setting...a man will teach the boys and a woman will teach the girls in both outdoor and indoor settings. You will be amazed the progress the outdoor teaching achieved with both male and female children compared to the indoor children.
ScAm, it taken you awhile to bring the article back. You must've checked out what I said in the above comment and found it has some sound validity in that your journal was the one who wrote the article about the teacher in Organ State that takes her prekindergarden (three to four year olds) class out side to teach them. Her class's IQ, you found, is several points above the children who sit in a poorly ventilated class room. The outside school will also save states and governments millions of dollars in school upkeep and utilities. It is a win win for everyone, especially for the children. There is no better class room, or teacher, than the Earth itself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDobzhansky was right: Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. 15,000 years ago, men made a living chasing down big game with primitive weapons and defending it against other predators and rival groups, and taught their boys to do likewise. Our genes haven't changed much since then.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWomen too will hunt down and kill small game (rabbits), with no weapons at all. In wartime Britain with meat rationed, a rabbit made a tasty meal. As the last wheat was cut, the rabbits dashed out and we grabbed them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what does that say about female genes?
And in the single sex schools of those days, we paid attention to our lessons, not the opposite sex.
Women too will hunt down and kill small game (rabbits), with no weapons at all. In wartime Britain with meat rationed, a rabbit made a tasty meal. As the last wheat was cut, the rabbits dashed out and we grabbed them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo what does that say about female genes?
And in the single sex schools of those days, we paid attention to our lessons, not the opposite sex.
Perhaps the early years of infants and even beyond should teach ancient hunting and cooking skills. This might instill a motivation to learn for learning sake - so as to escape this hard existence - and appreciate the easier life that language and math can bring. Perhaps a lot of what is missing in under performing children is motivation, and perhaps the primal lifestyle of prehistory produced a motivation to escape it. May be we have to be cruel to be kind to our children instead of over protecting them - which we might have learned to do to too great degree with our modern human lifestyle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Cruel to be kind" is just a lame excuse to be an idiot. Very young children learn best via large amounts of time spent with parents. Not daycare but actual parents. As they get a little older they transition to learning from peers and teachers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile I rarely agree with JamesDavis on anything he is very well informed on the impact of expanding and contracting mental stimuli upon the human mind. The natural world engages most of the human mind where as eliminating most external stimuli and forcing input to be limited to a tiny narrow stream disengages the human mind and forces much of the mental capacity into stagnation and disengagement.
You lose it if you don't use it. This is true of muscle as well as mind.