Schools: A Challenge for a Child's Brain Learning Ability

We humans are educational powerhouses. We are the only species that creates educational toys, pursues electronic engineering for early childhood education, designs school curricula, and markets useful goods aimed at improving education. Our exclusive talent for learning and teaching has led to the development of various educational tools: primary school textbooks, historical books, assessment methods, standardized tests, and report cards. As a result, human achievements far exceed those of other animal species. Building underwater tunnels, creating smartphones, DNA separation, organ transplants, drawing self-portraits, composing symphonies, producing documentaries, and flying to the moon. No other species comes close to our achievements. Before I begin to boast about our educational and developmental prowess, I must say that other animals also have some degree of education and learning. Adult chimpanzees, for example, teach younger chimpanzees how to find a nectar-coated branch and use it for termite fishing. They perform this task in front of the younger chimpanzee so it can follow along. However, the younger chimpanzees are not aware that this is a training class. Adult chimpanzees also do not realize this is a workshop; they are just finding food. Humans, on the other hand, grow up with educational techniques. For instance, I intentionally and with practice taught my young son how to tie his shoelaces. I asked him to watch a few times, then practice, and when he made a mistake, I showed him the correct way. But a female baboon never teaches her child how to tie. The reason the female baboon does not do this is that she does not understand that her child does not know how to tie its shoes. Similarly, young primates never realize that their mothers do not know that their offspring cannot tie. Our ability to intend to teach and learn is due to our capacity to be aware of what is happening without needing to probe ourselves or read others like an open book. This ability to read minds falls under the branch of 'theory of mind,' which distinguishes us from other animals. We are so adept at telepathy that we do not even need to be physically close to someone to know what is going on inside them. For example, consider the beginning of the novel 'I Capture the Castle' by Dodie Smith: 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. I mean, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the floor of the kitchen, where I have a dog blanket and a cup of tea to keep me warm and cozy. It cannot be said, of course, that it is a very comfortable place because of the smell of soap, but it is the only place in the kitchen that does not get the sun. I realized that if you sit somewhere you have never sat before, it can be very inspiring.' As a reader, you understand that such imagery is not a simple recipe for syrup or a logical deduction of several tasks. This layered description is the complex and challenging work of the theory of mind. Our ability to understand the minds of others gives us the capacity to teach with intention. Because if we were unaware that our children do not know, we would have no motivation to teach them or pass on our abilities and skills. If adults were unaware of children's ignorance, conscious education and schools would never have formed. Children also ask themselves: why does the teacher want me to open the book and show me things and tell me stories? Maybe he is teaching me how to learn to read. If children did not know what the teacher was doing and what he was supposed to teach them, they would never agree to go to school. Our ability to focus our will and establish an educational system, school, classroom, and tests may be a reason we know precisely what we want to do, ensuring that children need education to survive in modern society and climb the ladder of success. But in reality, we do not know much. Many times we forget that formal education, lessons, and schools are alien to brain ecology. A young brain is not designed to sit at a desk, learn lessons, memorize tables, remember the capitals of countries, do homework, and take tests. The evolution of the brain for learning has taken a completely different path. Many times my daughter asks me: 'Mom, why do I need to learn the names of all the U.S. presidents when they can all be searched on Google?' or she asks me: 'Mom, how about you? Do you remember all the names of the U.S. presidents?' But I think this was not an issue 10,000 years ago, and a child would not ask their mother why they should learn how to tie a stone to a stick to make an axe. For about 99% of the time since modern humans – sapiens – established schools, education has been based on demonstration and practice. Everyone learned what to do and how to coordinate it with others in the group to get through daily life. The reasons for each new skill were clear: parents or guardians were not supposed to teach children which plants were edible because they had a botany class next week and needed to prepare for the exam. Children learned to gather healthy and edible food for lunch. Education remained this way until humans abandoned tribal life and gathering and hunting for food, forming stable societies and domesticating plants and animals. The need for change and skill learning from one generation to the next required teaching children. Initially, just working with them from childhood and learning was enough, but as issues became more intricate and tools more complex, the need for education outside of specific domains arose. Today, formal education is essential for anyone's success. However, the novelty of this method is still not fully understood. Although humans have witnessed evolution over the past two or three million years, the history of education and school attendance has only been experienced in the last few hundred years. Modern education today is entirely incomprehensible to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Nowadays, all educational matters occur outside the realm of that work in buildings called schools. We pull children out of their natural environment and send them for eight hours a day to be with adults and other children who know nothing about each other. Children are asked to learn lessons 'for their own sake' and read them not because it relates to their lives and they want to solve a complex problem or that their survival secrets lie within it. The performance of numbers, sorting words in order, lessons from the history of each country and world history, learning the names of the layers of the earth and the difference between potential and kinetic energy, are all things that have no relevance to children's lives outside the classroom. Many times my daughter asks me: 'Mom, why do I need to learn the names of all the U.S. presidents when they can all be searched on Google?' or she asks me: 'Mom, how about you? Do you remember all the names of the U.S. presidents?' But I think this was not an issue 10,000 years ago, and a child would not ask their mother why they should learn how to tie a stone to a stick to make an axe. This brief history is to show why current formal schools are a challenge for a child's brain learning ability. We ask children to learn things that are entirely alien to their brain ecology and environment. Although education is a novel phenomenon for us, human fossils show that the human brain has not undergone significant volumetric changes (it has not grown larger) in the past 250,000 years and has only slightly increased in size over the past 35,000 years. This means that there has not been much time for natural selection to adapt the brain to the challenges and conditions of modern education. Yet we still sit children in classrooms, lecture them, assign homework, and give them various standardized tests. All of this is a novel phenomenon for the brain, and in millions of years of evolution, it has not had the opportunity to even predict such conditions. If we consider formal schools as a novel phenomenon for evolution, we should not be too surprised that children have difficulties and challenges in performing these activities. Likewise, we should not be astonished that children do not pay attention to things outside their realm of life and activity and lack motivation to learn them, especially children who are constantly equipped with learning skills in nature. For example, it is very hard for a child to come to class, learn letters, write each one four times, and sort words alphabetically. This is especially true when no one outside of school practices reading with them. However, if the parents of this child constantly talk to them about educational books, storybooks, traffic signs, and writings on boards and shop signs and restaurant menus, not only will they seek to learn to read in class, but they will pursue it eagerly. For this reason, for example, a third grader may find it hard to learn how to calculate perimeter and area if no one outside the educational environment tells them what this skill is useful for and why it applies outside the classroom. The importance of an evolutionary perspective in education is to find appropriate ways to learn and motivate learning. For example, the motivation to learn reading does not come from the lesson itself. Motivation comes from the meaning of the words. Many times, children follow assignments without motivation, and even second graders bribe fifth graders to do their grammatical sentence sorting for them. But when writing is related to meaningful activities like reading books, writing messages, writing stories, writing texts, or even writing on Facebook, then motivation encompasses all writing-related tasks. Similarly, if math is not just that seven plus eight is greater than or less than ten. If math and calculation can apply to how to measure something, how much money is needed to buy something, or how to divide chocolate equally among friends, or how to measure how many swimsuits to take to the beach and how many bags to throw the swimsuit in after swimming, then it becomes applicable. For example, it is very hard for a child to come to class, learn letters, write each one four times, and sort words alphabetically. This is especially true when no one outside of school practices reading with them. However, if the parents of this child constantly talk to them about educational books, storybooks, traffic signs, and writings on boards and shop signs and restaurant menus, not only will they seek to learn to read in class, but they will pursue it eagerly. Of course, there are many ways to connect curricular materials to real-world issues, but unfortunately, most of this information is still centered around textbook content that goes to the classroom and desk. How can we expect students to learn about the real world when most of their education time is spent in the classroom? Imagine a doctor after eight years in classes where only lectures are given, wanting to start practicing medicine. Teachers and parents must connect some educational matters to the real world outside the classroom. Otherwise, it is no different than sitting a crow with several other birds in a class, giving them homework, showing them a documentary, and asking them to memorize a series of things. Then asking them to go outside and build a nest for themselves. As the education section editor of 'This Life Perspective' magazine, I examine the impacts of evolution from the perspective of education for children and adults in the modern world. We must remember that a classroom is not a homogeneous environment for us, and we should not be surprised why it is hard for children. I do not claim that an evolutionary perspective can solve issues related to modern education. But I just want to raise awareness among parents, guardians, educators, and teachers to find a better connection between modern life and the form of education. My goal is to advance a rich and relevant research literature on modern education and strive for scientific methods to be used. Much of what happens today in classrooms contradicts scientific research on children's learning. According to millions of years of evolution, the human brain is programmed to pursue learning through: closely observing a real phenomenon, practical experience and research, correcting previous errors, and learning skills from those who know better. However, none of this occurs in a classroom. In many schools (not all, of course), there is an emphasis on curriculum, memorization, teaching, and how to pass the final exam. The same goes for higher education. The professor teaches, and the student takes notes to submit the same material in another language in the final exam. To prepare children for life in the modern world, we must connect effective ways between educational sciences and the form of learning. Some of these ideas are big, some small, but all need all their components.