#7. Beyond Groos: A Biological Theory of Education

Here I describe six basic human drives shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education.

Dear friends,

In Letter #4, I described Karl Groos’s practice theory of play, which he developed near the end of the 19^th century.  His contention was that the drive to play, and to play in certain ways, came about through natural selection in mammals because play is a vehicle for practicing skills that are essential for the animal’s wellbeing and survival. In other words, he contended that the primary evolutionary function of play is to induce individuals, especially when young, to practice life-promoting skills.

In applying the theory to humans, in his book The Play of Man, Groos contended that human children, when free to do so, play more, and in more different ways, and over a longer developmental period than do the young of other mammals because the human way of life requires more learning, more practice, of a greater variety of skills, than do the ways of life of other mammals. I elaborated on the practice theory in Letter #5 by listing skills that humans everywhere must learn and pointing out that those are skills at which children everywhere play. And then, in Letter #6, I described some of the characteristics of play that make it the ideal vehicle for practicing skills.

Now, here, my goal is to extend Groos’s thinking in a new way. At the end of Letter #4 I referred to Groos’s idea that human children come into the world biologically designed not only to play at the skills that children everywhere must learn, but also to pay attention to what older children and adults are doing and to incorporate that into their play. I hinted there that this makes Groos’s theory more than a theory of play. It’s at least the beginning of a theory of education.

One way to define education is as cultural transmission. It is the set of means, whatever they are, that lead each new generation of people in any cultural group to acquire, and maybe build upon, the culture—that is, the skills, knowledge, beliefs, and values—of the previous generation. Groos’s theory is a clear statement that children actively acquire the culture; they are not dependent on deliberate instruction from adults. They pay attention, incorporate what they see and hear into their own ways of thinking, and practice what they see and hear in their play.

Groos’s theory is the germ that has led me to develop a more elaborate biological theory of self-directed education. My thesis is that children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. We adults don’t have to educate children. In fact, I would contend, it’s not possible for us to educate them. Our task instead is to provide the conditions that allow children to educate themselves.

By this theory, education is an active process controlled by the learner, who uses other people as models and prime reference material. Our usual way of talking about education is backward. We speak of teachers giving an education and students receiving it. The teachers are presented in the active voice and learners in the passive, as if learning is simply the passive reception of teaching. But learning, real learning, of the sort that is incorporated into one’s being, that is truly educative, is always active. Being forced to parrot what you aren’t interested in is just annoying.

Schools, along with the idea that children must be forced to learn, are new—at most three or four hundred years old for the great majority of cultural groups. But we have been cultural animals for as long as we have been human beings, dependent on education, that is, on cultural transmission. Any children over those hundreds of thousands of years who failed to learn the skills and ways of being of the cultural group into which they were born would have a difficult time surviving and an even more difficult time reproducing. So, natural selection would favor any genetic tendency to pay attention to, and practice, the ways of the surrounding people.

The Educative Instincts

When I say that children are biologically designed to educate themselves, I mean they are born with certain instinctive drives shaped, over eons, by natural selection to serve the purpose of education. Here are the most obvious of those drives.

Curiosity: The drive to explore and understand

Aristotle began his famous treatise on metaphysics with the words, “Human beings are naturally curious about things.” Nothing could be truer. We are intensely curious, from the moment of our birth to, in many cases, the moment of our death. But curiosity, is especially manifest in the young, as everything is new to them, everything is ripe for exploration.

Researchers have found that newborn infants, just a few hours old, as soon as their eyes can fix on an object, look longer at novel objects than at those they have already seen.  As they gain mobility, first with their arms and hands and then their legs, they use that mobility to explore ever-larger realms of their environment. We need to babyproof our houses because our babies want to get at and into everything to explore their properties. What would happen if I dropped this vase onto the floor?

We don’t need to encourage children to explore and learn from it. In fact, we can’t stop them from doing it unless we lock them into closets.

Playfulness: The drive to practice and create

If you think about it, you realize there are two main aspects to education—the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of skills. Curiosity serves the first of these and play the second. I will not elaborate on play here, because I devoted Letters #4, #5, & #6 to the ways play is designed for the practice of skills, and I will have more to say about that, and about play’s role in all sorts of creative activities, in future letters. I’ll just note, as reminder and preview, that wherever children have ample time and opportunity to play they play naturally at all the basic skills that human beings everywhere must learn and at the culture-specific activities they see around them.

Communicativeness: The drive to know what others know and share what you know

Children can be curious about anything in their environment, but they are especially curious about other people. They observe others to see what they are doing and try to figure out why they are doing it. Once they have language they listen to others’ words. Children learn much more by overhearing what others around them are saying than from verbal lessons directed at them. We all like to eavesdrop, and children are no exception. As they get older, children learn through conversations with other children and sometimes with adults.

Children are motivated not only to learn from others but also to share with others what they know. We are, among other things, the animal that survives by sharing knowledge. That is why language evolved in our species. We don’t all have to discover, by trial and error, that there is a tiger over the hill to the west, or that blueberries are ripening over the hill to the east, or that certain mushrooms are poisonous. We can learn it from others who have already made the discovery and even from others who have only heard about the discovery. Conversations, stories, poems, and songs are all natural ways of sharing knowledge and ideas. This is natural teaching, Mother Nature’s way of making each person’s knowledge and thoughts available to many.

Willfulness: The drive to take charge of one’s own life

Although we are intensely social beings, dependent on cooperation with others throughout life, we are at the same time independent beings, who need to take charge of our own lives, including our ways of interacting with others. From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of childhood is to learn what we must to become independent, and that requires practice with increasing levels of independence with age.

As children grow older, from about age two on, they strive to take ever greater control of their lives. Two-year-olds whose favorite word is “no” are already expressing the desire to make their own decisions. Also beginning around that age, children want to do for themselves whatever they think they can do. They don’t want any more help than they need, and we adults do them a favor if we don’t provide more help than they need.

Psychologists have shown, in many research studies, that one of our strongest drives throughout life is for autonomy, that is, to make our own decisions and take charge of our own lives. When that drive is not satisfied, we become depressed and anxious. There are good reasons to believe that the high levels of depression and anxiety among young people in our culture today derive from our not allowing them the freedom that children had in the past to play, explore, work, and do other things independently of direct adult supervision and control (see here).

Planfulness: The drive to think about and plan for the future

This is the most consciously cognitive of the basic educative drives, and it develops more slowly than the others. planning manifests itself first in children’s play. The decision to play at something is itself a plan. For example, a decision to build a sandcastle is a plan, and the subsequent building of the castle is a manifestation of the plan.

As children get older, they begin to plan further ahead. For example, a four-year-old building a sandcastle who is called away for lunch may say to his playmates, let’s continue building after lunch. That’s a plan, which they may or may not follow. With further age and practice they become ever better at followings through on their plans and plan for more distant events. By the time they are teenagers, if they have had sufficient opportunities to plan and carry out self-chosen activities through childhood, they may start thinking about what kind of adult career they would like and how to prepare themselves for that career. That is when self-education becomes more conscious and deliberate.

The desire to grow up

Complementing all the drives just mentioned is the inborn desire in children to grow up. Children want to be older than they are, want to do what older children do and ultimately what adults do. In their fantasy play, they prefer to play adult roles, especially powerful ones. They play at being mommy or daddy, or Superman or Wonder Woman, or doctor or firefighter. Peter Pan, the story of a boy who didn’t want to grow up and never did, is an adult fantasy, not a child’s. The drive to grow up is a powerful motivator for observing, thinking about, and practicing grown-up roles.

How Our Schools Shut off Children’s Natural Ways of Learning

We adults do not educate children, but we are (or should be) responsible for providing the conditions that allow children to educate themselves. Unfortunately, the schools we provide at public expense, ostensibly for children’s education, are settings that not only fail to optimize children’s natural ways of educating themselves but appear to be deliberately designed to shut them off.  Thank of it:

• Curiosity is squelched in schools because it distracts children from the required curriculum. It’s not possible for all the children in a classroom to be curious about the same thing at the same time, so permitting curiosity and exploration would result in chaos that cannot be tolerated in our typical schools. It would prevent pursuit of the required curriculum.

• Play, of course, would also disrupt the “work” that goes on in the classroom, so it too must be squelched. To the degree that play is allowed at all at schools, it’s called “recess.” Not learning, but a break from learning.

• Communication, which would be manifested by children helping one another on lessons and sharing answers to test questions, is called “cheating” in schools. Moreover, any sort of meaningful discussion would, like exploration and play, be disruptive to the goal of making it through the required curriculum.

• Willfulness, of course, must be shut off in our typical schools. The primary lesson of school is obedience to authority, the opposite of willfulness. You must do what the teacher tells you to do. Willfulness always gets you into trouble in school. The only way you can pass in school is to do what teachers tell you to do, and almost the only way you can fail is to refuse to do what they tell you to do.

• Planning, at least planning about activities to pursue and how to pursue them, is also largely shut off at school, as the school does children’s planning for them. The school authorities tell the children what they are going to do at any given time, and for how long, and pretty much how they are going to do it. So, children have little opportunity to exercise and grow their capacity to make plans for themselves.

• The desire to grow up is not fully quashed at school, but it is certainly not given much fertilizer. Children and even teens are treated continuously as inferior beings, subject to absolute rule by the adults, so there is little opportunity to feel the kind of growing sense of maturity, autonomy, and personal responsibility that are marks of growing up.

What should we provide, instead of our present-day standard schools, to enable children to make optimal use of their natural ways of educating themselves?  That I’ll save for a future letter, but many of you may already have some good ideas about it.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

Notes

Please feel free to comment, with any questions or thoughts you have about this letter. I will read all comments and reply if I have something useful to add.

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