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Evolutionary Thinking in Medicine pp 89–102Cite as

Is Calculus Relevant to Survival? Managing the Evolutionary Novelty of Modern Education

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Abstract

Humans have always educated their children, but until recently education was done “hands-on” by a parent, familiar adult, or more competent peer. It has only been within the last few centuries that a significant number of the world’s children must learn some culturally important context-independent skills, such as reading, writing, and mathematics. These skills are usually taught to children by unfamiliar adults in unfamiliar settings. The result is that much of formal education is an evolutionary novelty. Sitting in classrooms, reading books, or memorizing multiplication tables were certainly not requisite skills for our evolutionary forechildren to master. Yet such evolutionarily novel tasks are critical for functioning in modern societies, and children are quite capable of achieving such feats given appropriate attention and training. However, this leaves many contemporary societies with discrepancies between conditions of modern life and the evolutionary skill set endowed to each child by human cognitive evolution. It is the job of education to bridge this gap, and just as an evolutionary perspective can inform the study of child development at large, perhaps it can also inform educational practices. This chapter presents a brief summary of current common education practice and theory, followed by a description of theory and research underlying an evolutionary approach to education in an effort to prompt discussion regarding the merits and applicability of evolutionary reasoning to education.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 18512, USA

    P. Douglas Sellers II Ph.D. & Karin Machluf Ph.D.

  2. Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, 33431, USA

    Prof. David F. Bjorklund Ph.D.

Authors
  1. P. Douglas Sellers II Ph.D.
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  2. Karin Machluf Ph.D.
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  3. Prof. David F. Bjorklund Ph.D.
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Correspondence to P. Douglas Sellers II Ph.D. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford, United Kingdom

    Alexandra Alvergne

  2. Oxford, United Kingdom

    Crispin Jenkinson

  3. Paris, France

    Charlotte Faurie

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Sellers, P.D., Machluf, K., Bjorklund, D.F. (2016). Is Calculus Relevant to Survival? Managing the Evolutionary Novelty of Modern Education. In: Alvergne, A., Jenkinson, C., Faurie, C. (eds) Evolutionary Thinking in Medicine. Advances in the Evolutionary Analysis of Human Behaviour. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29716-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29716-3_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29714-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29716-3

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