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Evolution: Education and
Outreach
ISSN 1936-6426
Volume 4
Number 1
Evo Edu Outreach (2011)
4:28-40
DOI 10.1007/
s12052-010-0306-1
The Evolutionary Biology of Education:
How Our Hunter-Gatherer Educative
Instincts Could Form the Basis for
Education Today
1 23
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ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE
The Evolutionary Biology of Education: How
Our Hunter-Gatherer Educative Instincts Could Form
the Basis for Education Today
Peter Gray
Published online: 26 January 2011
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Abstract 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 educa-
tional 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
equipment and are free to play and explore with those
items; (e) are free to express and debate any ideas that they
wish to express and debate; (f) are free from bullying
(which includes freedom from being ordered around
arbitrarily by adults); and (g) have a true voice in the
group’s decision-making process. The per-student cost
required to create such settings is less than half that of the
average for our current public schools.
Keywords Education .Evolution .Hunter-gatherers .Play .
Children .Cultural transmission .Self-directed learning
Most of us when we hear the term education automatically
think of schooling. For this article, I ask you to keep these
two terms and concepts distinct. Schooling is a relatively
new cultural innovation. It is the deliberate provision, by
adults, of special settings and procedures designed to teach
specific skills, beliefs, and concepts to the young. Educa-
tion, in contrast, is far from new; it is older than our
species.As applied to our species, it is the entire set of
processes by which each new generation of human beings,
in any cultural group, acquires the skills, knowledge,
rituals, beliefs, lore, and values—in short, the culture—of
the previous generation. To say that we are the supremely
cultural animal is to say that we are the supremely
educative animal.
Beginning well over a million years ago, we (our human
genetic line) began moving along an evolutionary track that
made us ever more dependent on cultural transmission, that
is, upon education. Over time, we developed means of
hunting, gathering, processing foods, protecting ourselves
from predators, birthing, caring for infants, and combating
diseases that depended increasingly on detailed, learned
knowledge and theories about our local environment and on
well-honed skills, including the crafting and using of tools,
that were passed along from generation to generation. We
also came to depend on increasingly high levels of
cooperation within bands and across networks of bands,
which required the cultural transmission of social mores,
rules, rituals, stories, and shared cultural beliefs and values,
all serving to help promote cooperation.
In any human group, children who failed to acquire
crucial aspects of the culture around them would be at a
serious disadvantage for survival and reproduction. They
P. Gray
Department of Psychology, Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
P. Gray (*)
340 S. Quinsigamond Ave.
Shrewsbury, MA 01545, USA
e-mail: grayp@bc.edu
Evo Edu Outreach (2011) 4:28–40
DOI 10.1007/s12052-010-0306-1
Author's personal copy
would not know how to perform economically essential
tasks, how to get along well with others within their culture,
or how to attract a mate for reproduction. Natural selection,
then, would strongly favor characteristics that promoted
young people’s abilities to acquire the culture. These
characteristics are what I refer to as educative instincts.
The analysis that I present here suggests that the human
educative instincts have much more to do with learning
than with teaching. They are, largely, the characteristics that
lead young people, on their own initiatives, to observe,
explore, and practice essential elements of the culture that
surrounds them.
In this article, I begin by examining how education
occurs in hunter-gatherer cultures. It is in those cultures that
we see most clearly the power of the human educative
instincts. Then I present evidence, from research at a school
designed for self-education, that the same instincts that
worked so well to promote hunter-gatherers’education can
still work effectively today, in our culture, given appropri-
ate conditions. Finally, I point out how our traditional
schools make education difficult by removing the con-
ditions that allow children’s educative instincts to operate
effectively.
Education in Hunter-Gatherer Cultures
Our educative instincts took their present shape during the
hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history
when our ancestors were all hunter-gatherers. As one pair
of anthropologists put it, the hunter-gatherer way of life is
the only stable way of life our species has ever known (Lee
and DeVore 1968). By comparison, our post-hunter-
gatherer existence has been very short and turbulent. The
advent of agriculture, beginning roughly 10,000 years ago,
set into motion an ever-accelerating rate of cultural change
in how we humans live; but however we live, we continue
to do so with the biological drives and capacities that were
honed by natural selection during our hunter-gatherer days.
We can’t go back in time to observe education in our
pre-agricultural ancestors, but we can make reasonable
inferences about that process by examining it in those
groups of people, in various isolated parts of the world,
who managed to survive as hunter-gatherers into modern
times. Today, the pure hunting and gathering way of life is
almost completely obliterated, wiped out by intrusions from
modern civilizations. But as recently as the 1970s, and to
some degree even later, it was still possible for anthro-
pologists to find and study hunter-gatherers who were
nearly untouched by modern ways. To learn about
education in hunter-gatherer cultures, I have studied the
anthropological literature on children’s lives in such
cultures. To supplement that literature, I (along with
graduate student Jonathan Ogas) identified ten prominent
anthropologists who, among them, had studied seven
different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different con-
tinents and questioned them extensively, with a written
questionnaire, about their observations of children’s lives in
the cultures they observed.
For all of this work, I have focused exclusively on the
variety of hunter-gatherer cultures that anthropologists refer
to as immediate-return or egalitarian hunter-gatherers, or
sometimes as band societies. These are cultures in which
people live in small bands (typically of 20 to 50 persons,
including children) that move from place to place within a
large but circumscribed territory to follow the available
game and vegetation. They have a highly egalitarian social
structure, make decisions by consensus, own little property,
share food and material goods within and even across
bands, do not have means for long-term food preservation,
have little occupational specialization except that based on
gender, and reject violence as a legitimate means of solving
problems (Kelly 1995). Among the cultures of this type that
in one way or another were included in my study are the Ju/
’hoansi (also called the !Kung, of Africa’s Kalahari Desert),
Hazda (of Tanzanian rainforests), Mbuti (of Congo’s Ituri
Forest), Aka (of rain forests in Central African Republic and
Congo), Efé (of Congo’s Ituri Forest), Batek (of Peninsular
Malaysia), Agta (of Luzon, Philippines), Nayaka (of South
India), Aché (of Eastern Paraguay), Parakana (of Brazil’s
Amazon basin), and Yiwara (of the Australian Desert).
I have ignored, for this study, the category of hunter-
gatherer society referred to as delayed-return or non-
egalitarian hunter-gatherers, typified by the Kwakiutl of
the American northwest coast and the Ainu of Japan. These
are relatively sedentary societies where people exploit a
particular local resource for food (commonly fish). They
are characterized by high population densities, food storage,
resource ownership and defense, hierarchical social struc-
tures, inherited status, and relatively high rates of violence
and acceptance of violence as legitimate. Archeological
evidence suggests that these cultures are more recent than
the egalitarian band cultures and are less likely to represent
the predominant living conditions of our pre-agricultural
ancestors (Kelly 1995). In line with the practice of some
anthropologists, when I use the term hunter-gatherer,
unmodified, I am referring specifically to the band,
egalitarian variety.
Despite great differences in their geography and their
specific ways of hunting and gathering, hunter-gatherer
societies (of the band type) are remarkably similar to one
another in their basic social structure, social mores, and
approach to education. Such similarity, across continents,
adds confidence to the view that these societies represent
reasonably well the kinds of hunter-gatherer societies that
preceded the advent of agriculture. The research literature
Evo Edu Outreach (2011) 4:28–40 29
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and our survey concerning children’s lives in hunter-
gatherer cultures reveal a remarkably consistent story, from
culture to culture. Here are four conclusions that appear to
apply to all hunter-gatherer cultures (of the band type) that
have been studied (for more details, see Gray 2009a):
1. Hunter-gatherer children had to learn an enormous
amount to become effective adults.
It would be a mistake to assume that because hunter-
gatherer cultures were “simpler”than modern cultures,
children had less to learn. The hunting-and-gathering way
of life was highly knowledge-intensive and skill-intensive,
and because of the absence of occupational specialization,
each child had to acquire the whole culture, or at least that
part of it appropriate to his or her gender.
To become hunters, boys—and girls, too, in those
cultures where women as well as men hunted—had to
learn how to identify and track the many dozens of different
species of birds and mammals that their group hunted. They
had to learn how to craft to perfection the tools of hunting,
such as bows and arrows, blowguns and darts, snares, nets,
and so on. And, of course, they had to develop great skill at
using those tools. To become gatherers, girls—and boys
also, to the degree that men also gathered—had to learn
which of the countless varieties of roots, nuts, seeds, fruits,
and greens in their area were edible and nutritious; when
and where to find them; how to extract the edible portions;
and how to process them. In addition, hunter-gatherer
children had to learn to build huts, make fires, cook, fend
off predators, predict weather changes, navigate their
hunting and gathering grounds, treat wounds and diseases,
assist births, care for infants, maintain harmony in the
group, negotiate with neighboring groups, tell stories, make
music, and engage in the various dances and rituals of their
culture.
2. Hunter-gatherer adults did not direct children’s educa-
tion or in other ways tell them what to do. Children and
even adolescents were free to play and explore, on their
own, in their own chosen ways, “from dawn to dusk.”
In the words of hunter-gatherer expert Richard Lee
(1988, p. 264), hunter-gatherers were “fiercely egalitarian.”
They eschewed any attempts by one person to control the
behavior of others. They had no chiefs or “big men”; they
made all decisions within the band through debate until
consensus was reached. Such egalitarianism was necessar-
ily coupled with extraordinary personal autonomy. Hunter-
gatherers did not tell one another what to do. Each person
was free at any time to leave the band and join another
band, and would do so if he or she felt put-upon. People
were always free, on any given day, to join or not join a
hunting or gathering party. If they joined, it was because
they wanted to, not because they were compelled to. Food
was shared, and they would get the same portion regardless
of whether or not they had taken part in getting the food.
Remarkably, these principles of equality and autonomy
were applied as much to children as to adults. Adults did
not tell children what to do any more than they told other
adults what to do; they believed that children’s own wills
should be their guides. Here is a sample of quotations, from
various researchers and observers of hunter-gatherers, that
reinforce this point (Gray 2009a):
&“Aborigine children [of Australia] are indulged to an
extreme degree, and sometimes continue to suckle until
they are four or five years old. Physical punishment for
a child is almost unheard of”(Gould 1969, p. 90).
&“Hunter-gatherers do not give orders to their children;
for example, no adult announces bedtime. At night,
children remain around adults until they feel tired and
fall asleep.…Parakana adults [of Brazil] do not
interfere with their children’s lives. They never beat,
scold, or behave aggressively with them, physically or
verbally, nor do they offer praise or keep track of their
development.…Children do not go to parents for help
or to complain about one another.…Adults do not give
any indication of being worried about the psychological
future of their children. Whether or not their children
will become effective adults is not an issue”(Gosso et
al. 2005, pp. 218, 226).
&“The idea that this is ‘my child’or ‘your child’does not
exist [among the Yequana, of Venezuela]. Deciding
what another person should do, no matter what his age,
is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviors. There
is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse
to influence—let alone coerce—anyone. The child’s
will is his motive force”(Liedloff 1977, p. 90).
&“Infants and young children [among Inuit hunter-
gatherers of the Hudson Bay area] are allowed to
explore their environments to the limits of their physical
capabilities and with minimal interference from adults.
Thus if a child picks up a hazardous object, parents
generally leave it to explore the dangers on its own. The
child is presumed to know what it is doing”(Guemple
1988, p 137).
&“Ju/’hoan children [of Africa’s Kalahari Desert] very
rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry
about. No child was ever yelled at or slapped or
physically punished, and few were even scolded. Most
never heard a discouraging word until they were
approaching adolescence, and even then the reprimand,
if it really was a reprimand, was delivered in a soft
voice”(Thomas 2006, p 198).
To her description of Ju/’hoan child-raising practices,
Thomas (2006, pp. 198–199) adds: “We are sometimes told
that children who are treated so kindly become spoiled, but
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this is because those who hold that opinion have no idea
how successful such measures can be. Free from frustration
or anxiety, sunny and cooperative, and usually without
close siblings as competitors, the children were every
parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better,
more intelligent, more likable, more confident children.”
[Thomas’s statement about the lack of close siblings as
competitors refers to the fact that births for hunter-gatherer
women are usually spaced at least four years apart. The
continuous, on-demand nursing of children until they are
three or four years old apparently produces a hormonal
effect that delays ovulation in women who are lean, as
hunter-gatherer women are, and serves as a natural means
of birth control.]
Hunter-gatherer children generally stay within eyeshot or
at least hearing distance of their mothers or other adults
until they are about four years old, at which age they begin
to prefer the company of other children and begin to run
freely with other kids. In our survey, we asked the ten
anthropologists how much time children in the culture they
observed were free to play each day, and the answer we
received from all of them was essentially this: “They were
free to play almost all of the time, from dawn to dusk.”
Here are three typical responses (Gray 2009a):
&“Both girls and boys had almost all day every day free
to play”(Alan Brainard, concerning the Nharo, of
southern Africa).
&“Children were free to play nearly all the time; no one
expected children to do serious work until they were in
their late teens”(Karen Endicott, concerning the Batek
of Malaysia).
&“Boys were free to play nearly all the time until age 15–
17; for girls most of the day, in between a few errands
and some babysitting, was spent in play”(Robert
Bailey, concerning the Efé, of central Africa).
These comments are consistent with published reports. In a
formal study of Ju/’hoan children’s activities, Patricia Draper
(1976, pp. 210, 213) concluded: “Girls are around 14 years
old before they begin regular food gathering and water- and
wood-collecting. This is in spite of the fact that they may be
married before this age. Boys are 16 years old or over before
they begin serious hunting.…Children do amazingly little
work.”The Hazda (of the Tanzanian rainforests in Africa)
are sometimes cited as an exception to the rule that hunter-
gatherer children engage in little productive work. Hazda
children forage for a good portion of their own food. But a
study of Hazda children, aged 5 to 15, revealed that they
spent only about two hours per day foraging, in the rich
vegetative areas near camp, and that even while foraging
they continued to play (Blurton Jones et al. 1994).
A number of researchers have compared the child-
raising practices of hunter-gatherers with those of agrarian
(farming) communities. While hunter-gatherer parents are
indulgent and permissive, agrarian parents are typically
strict and autocratic (Barry et al. 1959). While hunter-
gatherers value their children’s willfulness and indepen-
dence, agrarian parents value obedience. While hunter-
gatherer children are free to play and explore all day on
their own, agrarian children are required to work a good
portion, if not most of the day, at chores in the home and
field. A study of peoples in Botswana with mixed hunter-
gatherer and agrarian subsistence revealed that the more a
family was involved in hunting and gathering and the less
they were involved in farming, the more time children had
to play (Bock and Johnson 2004).
Researchers have offered a variety of interrelated
explanations of the differences between hunter-gatherers
and farmers in child-raising practices. Perhaps the most
obvious explanation has to do with the immediate econom-
ic benefits, or lack of such benefits, gained from children’s
work. Hunting and gathering are knowledge- and skill-
intensive, but not labor-intensive. The adults hunt and
gather with a sense of play, and they have plenty of time
left over for such leisure activities as gossiping, visiting
friends in neighboring bands, making music, and in other
ways playing (Gray 2009a; Sahlins 1972). Moreover, the
birth rate among hunter-gatherers is relatively low, so there
are relatively few young mouths to feed. Hunter-gatherers
simply don’t need child labor. In contrast, farming is highly
labor-intensive, and much of that labor is unskilled and can
be done by children. Farmers typically have more children
than do hunter-gatherers, and to feed and care for them all
the children must work.
Other explanations, quite closely related to this immedi-
ate economic one, focus on the values imparted by the
different methods of child rearing and on parents’goals in
child raising (Barry et al. 1959; DeVore et al. 1968). The
social and economic life of adult hunter-gatherers requires
assertiveness, creativity, and individual judgment. To have
influence in a society where decisions are made by debate
and consensus, you must be assertive. Hunting and
gathering themselves require creative, diverse methods
and on-the-spot judgments to meet the unpredictable,
ever-changing conditions of nature. As Whiting (in DeVore
et al. 1968) has pointed out, the permissive parenting style
of hunter-gatherers seems ideally designed to promote
assertiveness, creativity, and independence. In contrast,
most agrarian societies have a stratified, hierarchical social
structure, with landowners at the top, where obedience to
lords and masters may be essential to survival. Moreover,
farming itself depends more on adherence to tried and true
routines than on individual creativity. It is no wonder, then,
that farming parents should be motivated to beat the
willfulness out of their children and train them in lessons
of conformity and obedience.
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When hunter-gatherer adults were asked about their
child-raising practices, they talked about each person’s right
to make their own decisions, but they also pointed out that
young people learned through their freely chosen activities
and would begin to contribute to the band’s economy, on
their own free will, when they were ready to do so. Their
view of education seems well summed up by a Ju/’hoan
folk expression that can be translated roughly as “Children
teach themselves”(Bakeman et al. 1990).
3. Hunter-gatherer children acquired the skills of their
culture, and consolidated their knowledge, by playing
at culturally valued activities.
Hunter-gatherer children were never isolated from the
activities of adults in the band. They observed all that went on
and they heard the gossip, stories, and debates of adults. They
incorporated all this into their play, not because any adult told
them to but because they were naturally motivated to.
In response to our survey question about what the
children played at, we received many answers that showed
that children played at activities that were of economic or
social value in their culture (Gray 2009a). Digging up
tubers, fishing, smoking porcupines out of holes, cooking,
caring for infants, climbing trees, building vine ladders,
building huts, using knives and other tools, making tools,
carrying heavy loads, building rafts, making fires, defend-
ing against attacks from make-believe predators, imitating
animals (a means of identifying animals and learning their
habits), making music, dancing, storytelling, and arguing
were all mentioned by one or more respondents. The
specific lists differed from culture to culture, in accordance
with differences in the skills that were exemplified by
adults in each culture.
All of the respondents said that boys in the culture they
studied engaged in a great deal of playful hunting. The two
respondents who studied the Agta (of the Philippines)—a
culture in which women as well as men regularly hunt—
noted that girls as well as boys in that culture engaged in
much playful hunting. Young children, with little bows and
arrows (or other weapons, depending on the culture), might
in their play shoot at butterflies, toads, and rodents.
Eventually, as they became skilled, they might in their play
begin to kill some small animals and bring them home to
cook. Over time, playful hunting gradually became real
hunting, still in the spirit of play.
Collin Turnbull, who studied and wrote extensively
about the Mbuti (of Africa’s Ituri Forest), described how
Mbuti children of both sexes (age 9 and up) practice the art
of argument in their play. He wrote:
It may start through imitation of a real dispute the
children witnessed in the main camp, perhaps the
night before. They all take roles and imitate the
adults. It is almost a form of judgment for if the adults
talked their way out of the dispute the children having
performed their imitation once, are likely to drop it. If
the children detect any room for improvement,
however, they will explore that, and if the adult
argument was inept and everyone went to sleep that
night in a bad temper, then the children try and show
that they can do better, and if they cannot, then they
revert to ridicule which they play out until they are all
rolling on the ground in near hysterics. That happens
to be the way many of the most potentially violent
and dangerous disputes are settled in adult life.
(Turnbull 1982, pp. 142–143)
Turnbull noted in his writings that Mbuti children would
build a whole village of play huts, some distance away
from their band’s actual temporary village, and then use
that as a playground to act out scenes they had witnessed
among the adults or to improvise new ones. In her response
to our survey, Nancy Howell reported the same observation
concerning Ju/’hoan children. Apparently, hunter-gatherer
children, in their play, spend a great deal of time practicing
the arts and crafts of adulthood.
4. Hunter-gatherer children and adolescents played and
explored together in age-mixed groups.
The play of hunter-gatherer children occurred almost
always in age-mixed groups. A typical group playing
together at any given time might consist of half a dozen
children ranging in age from 4 to 11, or from 7 to 15. Even
if hunter-gatherer children wanted to segregate by age, they
would rarely find more than one or two playmates within a
year or two of their own age. Because hunter-gatherer
bands were relatively small and births were widely spaced,
the number of potential playmates for any given child was
limited. As Patricia Draper put it, in her response to our
survey: “Any child with enough motor and cognitive
maturity could enter into any game. Older teenagers and
adults could and did play as well, though not for as long or
with the same enthusiasm as the children.”I will return
later to the issue of age mixing. I think it plays a huge role
in children’s natural means of education.
Education at a Modern Democratic School Designed
for Self-Education
At this point you might be thinking: “Well, that system of
education may have been fine for hunter-gatherers, but we
are not hunter-gatherers. The educational needs of our
children today are very different.”Indeed, our children’s
educational needs are in some ways quite different from
those of hunter-gatherers. For starters, we have reading,
writing, and arithmetic—skills that were foreign to hunter-
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gatherer cultures. Some educational researchers, including
at least one who brings an evolutionary perspective to his
work (Geary 2008), have argued that children’s natural
ways of learning are inadequate for learning the three R’s
and that is one reason why school-imposed drill is essential.
I might agree were it not for my observations and research
at a remarkable alternative school, the Sudbury Valley
School, located in Framingham, Massachusetts.
Sudbury Valley defies the usual conceptions of what a
school must be in our modern era. Here is a brief
description. The school admits students from age 4 on
through high school age, on a first-come first-served basis,
with no attention to measures of ability. It is a private day
school, but it operates on a per-pupil budget less than half
that of the local public schools. In recent years, the school
has generally had between 140 and 200 enrolled students
and nine or ten adult staff members. The school is governed
by the School Meeting, which makes all school rules, at
which each student and staff member has one vote. The
school has no curriculum, gives no tests, does not monitor
students’progress, and does not assign students to classes
or special spaces. All students, regardless of age, are
allowed—all day long, day after day—to go wherever they
wish in the school’s two buildings and ten-acre campus, to
associate with whom they please, and to do whatever they
wish as long as it does not violate any of the school’s
democratically legislated rules (which serve to protect the
school community and the rights of individuals).
What the school does provide is access to tools of learning.
There are computers, books, a woodworking shop, a fully
equipped kitchen, a pond, a nearby woods, athletic equipment,
and adult staff members with expertise in a wide variety of
endeavors who provide help and instruction when asked. The
students have access to all of this, but they are never required
or coaxed to take advantage of any of these resources. Just as
is true of hunter-gatherer children and adolescents, they are
free to play and explore on their own, all day, every day, and
that is what they do. The staff at the school—and the parents
who send their children there—believe, as hunter-gatherers
did, that children who are allowed to play and explore freely
will learn what they need to know to become effective adults.
The school has been operating in this way for 43 years. It
has hundredsof graduates, including many who did all of their
primary and secondary schooling there. Follow-up studies—
including one that I conducted manyyears ago—show that the
graduates have done very well in life (Gray and Chanoff 1986;
Greenberg and Sadofsky 1992; Greenberg et al. 2005).
Those who have wanted to go to college—a group that
constitutes the majority of the graduates—have had no
difficulty getting into good colleges and doing well there,
and others have pursued good careers (in such areas as arts,
skilled crafts, information technology, and business startups)
that do not require college. Collectively, the graduates
occupy the whole range of professions that we value in our
society. The great majority of them report no regrets at all
about attending such an unusual school; they feel that the
school gave them many advantages. Relatively recently, a
worldwide Sudbury school movement has been spreading.
Today, worldwide, there are roughly 40 schools explicitly
modeled after Sudbury Valley (a list can be found at the
Sudbury Valley School website).
How do students learn at this school? Research that
my university students and I have conducted indicates
that they learn in very much the same ways that hunter-
gatherer children learn (Gray 2007). They explore and
play, in age-mixed groups as well as alone, at activities
that are valued in the culture around them, with tools that
are crucial to the culture. Whereas hunter-gatherer chil-
dren played with bows and arrows, digging sticks, and
vine ladders, Sudbury Valley students play at computers
and at games that involve the written word and numbers.
They explore not just by examining the immediate
physical and social world around them but also by reading
about the subjects that interest them and by asking
questions of staff members and other students. Sometimes,
a group of students will ask a staff member to lead a
course or regular discussion group on a topic of their
interest. In this environment, no bell tells them to stop
pursuing a passionate interest; they can delve as deeply as
they like, for as long as they like, into any subject that
they like. In the process, they develop the basic skills and
the passionate specific interests that lead, eventually, to a
career decision.
Another pool of children and adolescents learning on
their own in our society are those involved in the rapidly
growing “unschooling”movement (Kirschner 2008). These
are young people who don’t attend school at all. They are
usually officially registered as homeschoolers, but in fact
are not subjected to any curriculum or tests at home
because their parents subscribe to the philosophy that
children learn best when they pursue their own interests in
their own chosen ways. I have recently collected many
stories from unschooling parents about how their children
learned to read and to calculate with numbers, and
collectively, those stories make a case very similar to that
resulting from our studies at Sudbury Valley (for an
analysis of the stories, see Gray 2010a,d). Children on
their own initiative, in a literate and numerate culture,
naturally play with words and numbers and thereby become
readers, writers, and proficient enough with math to meet
the demands of life in our culture. Sudbury Valley children
and unschooled children do not develop the fear and
loathing of math that is so common elsewhere in our
culture, so if they choose to study math formally—for
example, to prepare to take the math SAT or ACT for
college admission—they learn quickly, eagerly, and effi-
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ciently. As is true of people in the larger culture, a few
enjoy numerical and abstract symbol play so much that they
go on to become mathematicians, and a few others enjoy
words so much that they become writers.
The Educative Instincts: Play and Exploration
In 1898, just 39 years after Darwin’sOn the Origin of
Species appeared, the German philosopher and naturalist
Karl Groos published a book entitled The Play of Animals
in which he applied Darwin’s theory to an analysis of
animal play. Like Darwin, Groos had a sophisticated,
modern understanding of the relationship between instinct
and learning. He recognized that learning is not something
that is superimposed upon instinct, but that it itself arises
out of instinct and serves, among other things, to modify
and refine instinctive behavior patterns to suit present
conditions. Groos’s central argument, in The Play of
Animals, was that mammals come into the world with
instincts to play at the vary activities that they most need to
develop in order to become effective adults. Predators play
at preying; prey animals play at dodging and darting and
getting away; monkeys play at swinging from branch to
branch in trees; males of most species play at fighting; and
so on. Groos’s book has had a great impact on modern
animal behavior research. It has inspired much research into
the functions of animal play, and its thesis, with some
refinements and qualifications, is generally accepted today
by biologists who study animal play.
Three years after the appearance of The Play of Animals,
Groos (1901) published a second book, The Play of Man, in
which he extended his theory of animal play to humans.
Groos recognized that a basic difference between humans and
other mammals lies in our extraordinary dependence on
culture. He recognized that our survival depends on our
abilities, when young, to acquire the skills and knowledge
unique to the culture in which we are born. So, according to
Groos, natural selection enlarged the play drive in humans and
shaped it in a manner to include a strong element of mimicry.
Human children play not just at species-specific skills (the
kinds of skills that characterize the species everywhere), like
other mammals do, but also play at culture-specific skills.
According to Groos, children come into the world with an
innate drive to look around and see what the adults, especially
the most admired and successful adults, are doing and to
incorporate those activities into their play.
Unlike his book on animal play, Groos’s book on human
play is little read today and rarely cited. In fact, it has been
allowed to go out of print. My research suggests, however,
that Groos’sThe Play of Man contains insights that should
be understood by every educator today. In fact, my main
criticism of Groos’s work on human play is that he didn’t
go far enough. He did not conceive of the idea that the
human instincts to acquire the culture around them are so
powerful that, given appropriate environmental conditions,
they can provide the primary foundation for education even
in our modern world.
In addition to play, the other powerful force for children’s
self-education is curiosity. Groos considered exploration
(motivated by curiosity) to be a category of play, but most play
researchers today consider the two to be distinct (Power 2000).
Learning can be divided at least roughly into two broad
categories—learning to do (skill learning) and learning about
(information learning). Play serves primarily the former, and
exploration serves primarily the latter. Stated differently,
exploration provides information and play provides practice.
Just as the play drive has expanded in our species to serve
the function of cultural acquisition, so apparently has curiosity.
Children and adolescents (and adults too) everywhere, when
free, show extraordinary curiosity about the world around
them, especially the social and cultural world. That is why
gossip is a central activity to every human culture. It also
explains why children pay special attentionto the activities and
conversations of older children and adults and why, when free
to do so, they ask never-ending questions about what is going
on. Given its extraordinary importance, psychologists have
paid far too little research attention to human curiosity.
Conditions that Maximize the Power of the Educative
Instincts
Because our instincts for self-education were shaped by
natural selection during the long period when we were all
hunter-gatherers, we might expect those instincts to function
best in the context of a hunter-gatherer band or a modern
setting that replicates essential aspects of such a band. The
founders of the Sudbury Valley School did not set out to
model a hunter-gatherer band. Their aim was to create a
school in line with the fundamental tenets of American
democracy (Sudbury Valley School 1970). But, to my eyes,
the school contains precisely those elements of a hunter-
gatherer band that are most essential for children’s self-
educative instincts to operate well. Perhaps this is no
coincidence. It can be argued that hunter-gatherer societies
were the original democracies (Ingold 1999). Here, I offer a
list of what seem to me to be the most crucial conditions for
children’s education—conditions that exist both in hunter-
gatherer bands and at the Sudbury Valley School (also
presented in Gray 2008b).
Time and Space for Play and Exploration
Self-education through play and exploration requires
enormous amounts of unscheduled time—time to do
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whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or
intrusion from authority figures. That time is needed to
make friends, play with ideas and materials, experience and
overcome boredom, and develop passions. In hunter-
gatherer bands, adults place few demands on children and
adolescents, partly because they recognize that young
people need to explore and play on their own to become
competent adults. The same is true at Sudbury Valley.
Self-education also requires space–space to roam, to get
away, to explore. That space should, ideally, encompass the
full range of terrains relevant to the culture in which one is
developing. Hunter-gatherer adults trust their children to
use good judgment in deciding how far they should venture
away from others into possibly dangerous areas. At
Sudbury Valley, children are likewise trusted, within the
limits set by prudence in our modern, litigious society.
They can explore the surrounding woods, fields, and nearby
stream, and by signing out to let others know where they
are going, those who have reached a criterion age can
venture as far off campus as they choose.
Free Age Mixing Among Children
As I noted earlier, hunter-gatherer children necessarily play
in age-mixed groups as there are not enough children of any
given age for age-segregated play. At Sudbury Valley, there
are enough children that they could play just with others
close in age, but they don’t. In quantitative studies, we have
observed that children commonly, of their own choice, play
across large age ranges—often of four years’difference or
more (Gray and Feldman 1997). Much of my own and my
university students’research at Sudbury Valley has focused
on the educative value of age mixing (Feldman and Gray
1999; Gray and Feldman 2004). We have described
evidence that age-mixed play is qualitatively different from
same-age play. It is less competitive, more nurturing, and
offers unique learning opportunities both for the older and
younger participants.
Age mixing allows younger children to play at and learn
from activities that they could not do alone. As illustration,
imagine two four-year-olds trying to play a simple game of
catch (Gray 2008c). They can’t do it. Neither can throw the
ball straight enough for the other to catch it, and neither can
catch well enough to snag the other’s wild throws. In a
world of just four-year-olds, there would be no catch. But a
four-year-old and an eight-year-old can play catch and
enjoy it. The older child can toss the ball gently into the
hands of the four-year-old so he or she has a chance to
catch it, and the older child can run and leap well enough to
catch at least some of the younger child’s wild throws. In a
world of just four-year-olds, there is no catch, but in a
world that includes eight-year-olds as well as four-year-
olds, everyone has a chance to learn and enjoy this skilled
game. The same applies to all sorts of activities that stretch
the abilities of younger children, including reading. A
common scene at Sudbury Valley is one in which a group
of children—some of whom can read and some of whom
cannot—are huddled around a computer screen or playing
some other kind of game that involves reading. The older
children read aloud the words that the younger ones cannot
read—not deliberately to teach but just to keep the game
going. The result is that the younger children pick up the
words they see in front of them and hear pronounced, and
soon they are in the initial stages of reading themselves.
Age mixing benefits the older children as well as the
younger. In an age-mixed environment, all children have
the opportunity to practice being mature—to practice
leading, guiding, and caring for others—through their
interactions with younger children. At Sudbury Valley, we
have observed countless instances in which older children
went out of their way to help much younger ones (Gray and
Feldman 2004). The presence of younger children seems to
draw out the nurturing instincts in children and adolescents
of both sexes and to promote the development of nurturing
behavior (for further evidence of this, see Ember 1973). We
also observed many scenes in which older children
explained concepts to younger ones—concepts such as
rules of a game, rules of the school, the best way to find
lost mittens, and the phonetic sounds of letters. As all
teachers know from experience, explaining a concept to
others is often the best way to stretch and consolidate one’s
own understanding of that concept. In an age-mixed
environment, all children have the opportunity to learn
through teaching.
Children learn from the presence of older and younger
children even when they are not directly interacting across
age. Older children provide models that younger ones try to
emulate. At Sudbury Valley, young children become
interested in reading not so much because they see adults
reading but more because they see children a little older
than themselves reading. Five-year-olds aren’t particularly
interested in emulating adults; adults are too far ahead of
them, too much in a different world. But five-year-olds do
very much want to be like the cool seven- and eight-year-
olds that they see around them. If those seven- and eight-
year-olds are reading and discussing books, or are playing
computer games that require reading, then the five-year-
olds want to do that too. The same applies to the whole
realm of activities that occur at the school—tree climbing,
cooking, playing musical instruments, and so on.
Just as younger children are attracted to the more
sophisticated activities of older ones, older children are
often attracted to the creative and imaginative activities of
younger ones. At Sudbury Valley, we have frequently
observed teenagers playing with paints, clay, or blocks, or
playing make-believe games, often with younger children.
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These are activities that most teenagers elsewhere in our
culture would have long since abandoned. Through such
play, the teenagers become wonderful artists, builders,
storytellers, and creative thinkers.
Comparable studies of age mixing in hunter-gatherer
bands have not been conducted, but I suspect that all of the
advantages of age-mixed play that we have observed at
Sudbury Valley would occur in hunter-gatherer bands as
well, though the specific activities practiced would be
different.
Access to Knowledgeable and Caring Adults
In hunter-gatherer bands, the adult world is not segregated
from the children’s world. Children see what adults do and
incorporate that into their play. They also hear the adults’
stories, discussions, and debates, and they learn from what
they hear. When they need adult help, or have questions
that cannot be answered by other children, they can go to
any of the adults in the band. All of the adults care for
them. Most of the adults, in fact, are literally their aunts and
uncles.
At Sudbury Valley, too, adults and children mingle
freely, though the ratio of adults to children is much smaller
there than in a hunter-gatherer band. There is no place in
the school where staff members can go but students cannot.
Students can listen into any adult discussions and observe
whatever the adults are doing, and they can join in if they
wish. Students who need help of any kind can go to any of
the staff members. A child who needs a lap to sit on, or a
shoulder to cry on, or personal advice, or the answer to
some technical question that he hasn’t been able to find on
his own, or (occasionally) more prolonged help in the form
of a tutorial or course, knows just which adult will best
satisfy his or her need. The adults are not literally aunts and
uncles, but they are much like aunts and uncles. They know
all of the students over the entire span of time that they are
students at the school (unlike teachers in a conventional
school who know each set of students for just one year) and
take pride in watching them develop. Since the staff
members must be reelected each year by vote that includes
all of the students in the school, they are necessarily people
who like kids and are liked by kids.
Access to Equipment and Freedom to Play
with that Equipment
To learn to use the tools of a culture, people need access to
those tools. Hunter-gatherer children played with knives,
digging sticks, bows and arrows, snares, musical instru-
ments, dugout canoes, and all of the other items of
equipment that were crucial to their culture. At Sudbury
Valley, children have access to a wide range of the
equipment that is of most general use to people in our
culture, including computers, woodworking equipment,
cooking equipment, art materials, sporting equipment of
various types, and many walls filled with books.
Free Exchange of Ideas
Intellectual development occurs best in a setting where
people can share ideas freely, without censorship or fear of
being ostracized. According to anthropologists’reports,
hunter-gatherers were non-dogmatic in their beliefs, even in
their religious beliefs (Gray 2009a; Thomas 2006). People
could say what they please, without fear, and ideas that had
any consequence to the group were debated endlessly. The
same is true at Sudbury Valley. The school has deliberately
refrained from becoming aligned with any particular
religious or political ideology. All ideas are on the table.
In this kind of environment, an idea is something to think
about and debate, not something to memorize and feed
back on a test. Daniel Greenberg, the school’s leading
philosopher, has described the school as “a free market-
place of ideas”(Sudbury Valley School 1970). Children
who may not hear much discussion of politics or religion at
home hear it at school, and they hear every side of every
issue.
Freedom from Bullying
To feel free to explore and play, a person must feel safe,
free from harassment and bullying. Such freedom occurred
to a remarkable extent in hunter-gatherer bands, and it does
also at Sudbury Valley. According to anthropologists, the
close-knit personal relationships, the age mixing, and the
non-competitive, egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherer cul-
tures worked effectively to prevent serious bullying (Gray
2009a). If an older or bigger child seemed to be picking on
a younger or smaller one, others would step in and quickly
stop it. The same occurs at Sudbury Valley, and in addition,
research at the school suggests that the simple presence of
young children has a pacifying effect on older children
(Gray and Feldman 2004). Moreover, at Sudbury Valley,
the school’s democratically created rules and judicial
system, in which children of all ages are involved, prevent
serious bullying. Students who feel harassed in any way
can “bring up”the offender, to appear before the Judicial
Committee, comprising school members of all ages. This
contrasts sharply with the case in many conventional
schools where bullying is a way of life (Gray 2010c, e).
Students there who report bullying are snitches or tattle-
tales, and teachers can often get away with bullying
because they make the rules and are not subject to them.
Because students make the rules at Sudbury Valley and
have responsibility for enforcing them, they have far more
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respect for the rules than do students in a standard school
who have little or no voice in rule creation or enforcement
(for further elaboration, see Gray 2010c).
Immersion in a Democratic Community
Hunter-gatherer bands and the Sudbury Valley School are,
in quite different ways, democracies. As I noted earlier,
hunter-gatherer bands did not have chiefs who make
decisions for the group. Instead, all group decisions were
made through long discussions until all who cared came to
an agreement. Anybody, including children, could take part
in those discussions. Sudbury Valley is administered
through a formal democratic process, involving discussions
and votes of the School Meeting, where each student and
staff member who chooses to attend has an equal vote.
Immersion in the democratic process endows each person
with a sense of responsibility that helps motivate education.
If my voice counts, if I have a real say in what the group
does and how it operates, then I’d better think things
through carefully and speak wisely. I’m responsible not just
for myself but also for my community, so that’s a good
reason for me to educate myself in the things that matter to
my community.
Why Our Standard Approach to Schooling Has Never
Worked Well
Our standard approach to schooling did not arise from
scientific research on how children learn, and it certainly
did not arise from any research that brought Darwinian
evolutionary insights to bear. It came about through an
historical process, which I will briefly summarize here (for
further detail and documentation, see Gray 2008a).
With the advent of agriculture, children’s as well as
adults’lives changed dramatically from what they had been
in hunter-gatherer times. Agriculture brought landowner-
ship, status hierarchies, and, most important for our
considerations, servitude and slavery. In these conditions,
human willfulness and the spirit of individual autonomy
were threats to survival. This cultural change came about
much too rapidly for natural selection to play a role. Babies
continued to be born, and still are, with all of the instincts
for self-determination and self-education that served so well
in hunter-gatherer days. To get children to abide by the new
rules of unquestioned conformity and obedience, willful-
ness had to be beaten out of children. Most children spent
most of each day at unskilled labor, doing much the same
kind of work that they would continue to do for lords and
masters in adulthood. This was the state of affairs through
the feudal Middle Ages and beyond. The Industrial
Revolution did not immediately improve these conditions.
In fact, for a while, it made things worse. Children
continued to be treated essentially as slaves, now working
in unhealthy, dirty, crowded factories rather than in fields
where they at least had experienced fresh air and sunshine.
For a variety of reasons, some religious and some
secular, the idea of universal, compulsory education
gradually arose and spread, beginning in the seventeenth
century in some parts of the world. Education was
understood as inculcation in a prescribed curriculum that
was deemed essential to the saving of souls, the generation
of patriots, or the production of good factory workers. With
the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as
children’swork, which they must be forced to do. The same
power-assertive methods that had been used to make
children work in fields and factories were quite naturally
transferred to the classroom. Nobody imagined that
learning could be play. By this time in history, children’s
own willfulness, playfulness, and curiosity were commonly
seen as works of the devil; surely, those aspects of
childhood were worthless for education. The literature of
early education is filled with accounts of the duty of
schoolmasters to beat children who disobeyed or failed to
learn the prescribed lessons. Play was seen as the enemy of
education, not the vehicle. The attitude of eighteenth
century school authorities toward play is well reflected in
John Wesley’s rules for Wesleyan schools, which included
the statement: “As we have no play days, so neither do we
allow any time for play on any day; for he that plays as a
child will play as a man”(quoted by Mulhern 1959, p.
383).
As time has moved on, the methods of schooling have
become less harsh (at least less corporally harsh), but basic
assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be
defined as children’s work, and power-assertive means are
used to make children do that work. A case can be made—
and has been made by Chudacoff (2007)—that the peak of
children’s freedom in the United States was reached in the
early to mid-twentieth century when most children had
been freed from long hours of farm or factory work, and
school and school-like activities occupied much less of
their time than they do today. Over the past 50 or 60 years,
schooling and school-like activities (such as organized, age-
segregated adult-directed sports) have expanded to take
over increasing portions of children’s time, leaving less and
less opportunity for children to bring their hunter-gatherer
instincts to bear in their own education. During that same
period, we have seen dramatic increases in childhood
anxiety, depression, suicide, obesity, and other mental and
physical ailments that can be attributed at least partly to the
stress of continuous evaluation by adults and the lack of
play (for documentation, see Gray 2010b).
Despite all of this time in school and our culture’s
extreme emphasis on schooling, the evidence is that
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children do not learn much in school. I, like other college
professors, must more or less start from scratch in teaching
college courses; I cannot assume that the students remem-
ber anything from comparable courses in high school. For
example, students spend thousands of hours on math drill in
school, and yet, a year or two out, they know little more
math than what they would have learned anyway, just in the
course of life. Worse, many of them, because of their school
experience, have developed such fears of math that they
avoid it like the plague (Burns 1998). Our schools do so
poorly because they are settings that more or less
deliberately deprive children of all of the conditions,
described above, that are essential for self-education:
&Children are not free to play, explore, and roam in
school. They are instead required to follow a curriculum
chosen for them by others and to spend most of the day
sitting in their seats.
&Children are strictly segregated by age in school, almost
completely deprived of opportunities to interact with
older and younger children, from whom they have the
most to learn.
&In the classroom, there is typically only one adult, who
may or may not be a caring person, and who may or
may not be approachable by students seeking help or
comfort. Moreover, that adult is often not seen by the
children as a full person, but as someone playing a
certain role, that of teacher. Models of other professions
and interests are completely lacking.
&Children may be exposed, in school, to some of the
equipment valued by our culture, but the exposure
typically occurs in ways that are controlled by the adults
and do not permit the sort of free play that promotes
deep and lasting learning.
&Free exchange of ideas is cut off in school, by the
prescriptions of the curriculum and by the tests that
provide “right”and “wrong”answers to essentially
every question.
&Because of the age segregation and the competitive
environment and the lack of freedom to leave when one
feels harassed, bullying and anxiety are part and parcel
of many children’s everyday school experience.
&Our standard schools are not, by any stretch of
imagination, democratic communities. They are highly
stratified top-down structures, with students at the very
bottom of the hierarchy.
So, what we do in our schools is to deprive children of
all of the conditions that they need to educate themselves,
and then we try to teach them something. No wonder the
teacher’s job is so hard. No wonder our children learn and
remember so little of what they are taught. No wonder most
children are less happy in school than almost anywhere else
(Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter 2003; Herman et al. 2009).
Readers familiar with educational theory know that some
of the criticisms of standard schooling presented in this
article are similar to criticisms that have long been raised,
without any explicit consideration of principles of evolu-
tion, by progressive educational theorists—from Rousseau
on through Montessori, Dewey, and the modern construc-
tivists (who emphasize Piaget’s ideas about child develop-
ment). It is noteworthy, however, that none of those
theorists suggest the degree of departure from standard
schooling that is described in this article and represented in
practice in hunter-gatherer cultures and Sudbury schools.
Progressive educational theories all leave adult educators
clearly in charge of children’s learning. In schools founded
on those theories, teachers attempt to use and direct
children’s drives to play and explore in ways designed to
meet the needs of an established curriculum, chosen by
educators, not by children.
The idea that children themselves are motivated to figure
out and learn what they need to know to do well in the
culture and can successfully direct their own education, if
provided with an appropriate environment, is not a
component of any of the educational theories discussed in
contemporary schools of education (see Gray 2009b; Gray
and Chanoff 1984). Moreover, the list of requirements for
an educational setting in which children’s educative
instincts can operate optimally, presented in this article,
cannot be found in any previous writings on education.
That list comes directly from a comparison of the
education-promoting elements of hunter-gatherer bands
with those present in a radically alternative modern-day
school where children have long educated themselves
successfully.
Directions for Further Research
The appropriately skeptical reader no doubt has many
questions concerning the ideas presented in this article, and
at least some of those questions provide directions for
further research.
The most direct evidence presented in this article for the
claim that the hunter-gatherer model of education can work
in modern times derives from studies of the Sudbury Valley
School and its graduates. But Sudbury Valley is just one
relatively small school. Although other Sudbury model
schools exist, systematic research at those schools is thus
far lacking. Moreover, the students at Sudbury Valley are a
self-selected group that, for one reason or another, chose to
attend a very unusual school and whose parents agreed to
that choice. Some enrolled at an early age because their
parents believed in this philosophy of education from the
outset, and others came at some point after starting school
elsewhere, often because of some problem related to their
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standard schooling, such as repeated failure, persistent
rebellion, or general unhappiness (Gray and Chanoff
1986). Although the students seem to me and to the
Sudbury Valley staff to encompass the whole normal range
of human personality—and they seem to learn well in the
school regardless of personality—we presently have no
way to prove that. Some students at some point leave the
school and return to a traditional public school, and to date
there are no systematic data on why they leave. It is
possible that the school does not work so well for some as
for others, and research aimed at understanding that would
be helpful. Hard evidence that the school works for students
over the whole normal personality range would increase
interest in the school as a general model for contemporary
education. On the other hand, evidence that it works well
for some but not all students would encourage those who
urge more choice in schools, so students could sort
themselves out according to their needs.
Aside from further research at Sudbury schools, the
analysis presented in this article suggests the need for more
studies of children’s self-directed play out of school, aimed
at understanding how such play leads to acquisition of
culturally valued skills, knowledge, and attitudes. A model
for such research is the work of Mitra (2003,2005) who
documented how thousands of impoverished, often illiterate
children in both urban and rural areas of India quickly and
efficiently taught themselves how to use a computer, when
they had access to one, through their social play and
exploration, with no adult guidance at all. Mitra’s research
has drawn a good deal of attention in the popular press, but
so far has not inspired comparable large-scale research by
others on children’s capacities to educate themselves.
The list of environmental attributes that optimize child-
ren’s abilities to educate themselves suggests further
directions for research. Most glaring, perhaps, is the need
for more research on the value of age-mixed interactions
among children and adolescents. Today, children are
segregated by age more than they ever have been in the
past. We not only have age-segregated school classrooms
but also age-segregated after-school programs, sports
programs, camping experiences, playgroups, and so on.
Opportunities for free age-mixed play in neighborhoods
have rapidly declined over the last several decades as
parents have become increasingly fearful of allowing
children to play freely outdoors. The reduced size of
nuclear families and reduced significance of extended
families (because of their geographical dispersion) have
also reduced opportunities for age-mixed play.
Perhaps partly because of such age segregation in the
society, very little research has been conducted on child-
ren’s age-mixed interactions, and almost no research has
been conducted on interactions among children or adoles-
cents varying in age by more than two or three years (see
Gray and Feldman 2004). If it is true, as suggested in this
article, that age mixing is a key component of children’s
abilities to learn through their self-initiated activities, then
age mixing should move to the forefront of topics for
research in developmental psychology and education.
Connections to the EvoS Consortium
As this special issue of Evolution: Education & Outreach is
dedicated to the EvoS (Evolutionary Studies) Consortium,
it seems fitting to end with a note connecting the present
article to EvoS. The inspiration for the article came, in part,
from the positive reactions to a talk I gave to the EvoS
group at Binghamton University in the fall of 2009. EvoS is
dedicated to the principle that an evolutionary perspective
can inform and improve critical thought and research across
the whole range of academic pursuits. The idea that
evolutionary thinking can inform thought and research on
education is doubly relevant to EvoS as education is not
only a topic of study in academia but is also the vehicle by
which academia progresses.
I was impressed in my presentation at Binghamton by
the playful and inquisitive spirit of those who attended my
talk and by the age mixing—among undergraduates,
graduate students, and faculty—that occurred during the
long dinner and questioning period that followed the talk.
Here was a place for free exchange of ideas, where people
at various positions on the academic road could learn from
and be inspired by one another. In one of his blog posts
(found at evostudies.org), David Sloan Wilson (2009)
describes well the central role of age mixing in the success
of the EvoS program. As Wilson’s thoughts make clear, an
evolutionary approach is valuable for understanding and
improving education across the lifespan.
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