Teaching: Natural or Cultural?

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that teaching, as we now understand the term, is historically and crossculturally very rare. It appears to be unnecessary to transmit culture or to socialize children.Children are, on the other hand, primed by evolution to be avid observers, imitators, players and helpers-roles that reveal the profoundly autonomous and self-directed nature of culture acquisition (Lancy in press a). And yet, teaching is ubiquitous throughout the modern world-at least among the middle to upper class segment of the population. This ubiquity has led numerous scholars to argue for the universality and uniqueness of teaching as a characteristically human behavior. The theme of this chapter is that this proposition is unsustainable. Teaching is largely a result of recent cultural changes and the emergence of modern economies, not evolution.

Four-Field Co-evolutionary Model for Human Cognition: Variation in the Middle Stone Age/Middle Palaeolithic

“…Human Teaching: an Archaeological Perspective Whilst many animals, especially primates, engage in advanced forms of social learning (de Waal 2016; Boesch et al 2019), processes of intentional teaching through verbal instructions, sounds and gestures, together with pro-social acts of feedback, are unique to humans (Kline et al 2013;Kline 2015;Gärdenfors and Högberg 2017). In some cultures, it is limited to a few specific instructive tasks; in others, it dominates the way children learn (Tomasello et al 1993;Strauss et al 2002;Gergely 2009, 2011;Lancy 2016). Several studies emphasise intentional teaching as important in cultural transmission when learning complex, cognitively opaque skills such as the making of elaborate stone tools (d'Errico and Banks 2015; Gärdenfors and Högberg 2017).…”

Teaching Through Collaboration: Flexibility and Diversity in Caregiver–Child Interaction Across Cultures

“…There is a lack of consensus, however, about the extent of both quantitative and qualitative global variation in teaching practices. Despite claims within the psychological literature that teaching is a universal and innate feature of adult–child interaction (Csibra & Gergely, 2011), some anthropologists report relatively infrequent teaching outside of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010) populations (Lancy, 2010, 2016). Data from hunter‐gatherer (Boyette & Hewlett, 2017; Hewlett, Fouts, Boyette, & Hewlett, 2011; Lew‐Levy, Reckin, Lavi, Cristobal‐Azkarate, & Ellis‐Davies, 2017), subsistence agricultural (Kline, Boyd, & Henrich, 2013; Little, Carver, & Legare, 2016), and industrialized populations (Csibra & Gergely, 2011) have provided support for claims about the universality of some teaching behaviors, such as pointing and joint attention.…”

How Young Children Learn from Others

“…Natural pedagogy rightly points out that teaching is a human‐unique form of social learning, with teachers deliberately presenting to children things to attend to and learn. Ethnographies support the theory's claim that teaching is a human universal ( pace Lancy, 2016, who thinks that teaching is absent in some societies). But the claim that pedagogical exchanges are independent of language is implausible.…”