Why Some Skills Can’t Be Taught in Schools: They’re “Biologically Primary”
Schools don’t teach what we’ve already evolved to learn.
Reading, writing, mathematics, science, history — there’s a fairly narrow set of subjects considered “academic.” But not everyone needs these to succeed in adult life. Shouldn’t we be taught skills that are more broadly useful, like how to socialize with others, or how to be a problem solver?
And if people do want to learn those “academic” subjects, can’t they just learn naturally? Apparently, this idea sure resonated with a lot of retweeters: “If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn’t learn to walk without going to school.”
A theory by David Geary makes a simple distinction between what isn’t fit for schools and what is — knowledge that’s biologically primary versus biologically secondary.
Put simply, schools don’t teach what we’ve already evolved to learn. Within the first year of our life, we figure out how to walk. We grow rapidly proficient in our native language just from hearing people around us. Throughout childhood, we learn appropriate ways to interact with others in our tribe. We’re not blank slates; our brains come equipped to learn what matters most. Just like any species, we’re expected to reach certain milestones as we grow, to the point that it’s deemed a disability when we don’t.
Contrast that with more recent developments in human knowledge, like chemistry and algebra. You can’t just absorb them. They’re not built into our brains; otherwise, we surely would have known them from the beginning of mankind! Generally, we learn them the way they’ve been learned since they were first invented: being taught by others.
Not everyone can be taught by their parents, since not all parents know these subjects well. Reading a book on it may not suffice, since learning a complicated subject can require years of dedicated repetition. So to pass on these new skills, people invented schools.
It’s been suggested that to prepare learners for the rapidly changing 21st century, schools should shift to teaching generic “problem-solving” skills. The problem with this is that problem-solving is biologically primary. The same mental heuristics used by expert scientists are used by young children too. The difference is not the kind of thinking, but the knowledge to think with.
Traditional school subjects may get boring, but they’re there for a reason. To help solve new scientific problems, for example, there’s a lot you need to know: not generic “scientific thinking,” but relevant scientific information. You can’t be expected to learn this all through observation, the way you learned basic skills of life, so schools provide structure for you to learn it. Ultimately, knowledge that has stood the test of time will help us solve problems of the future.
