"Evolutionizing" Education
What is your role in creating a better system?
This post is a little different from my others to date. Rather than focusing on a specific strategy or idea, I am sharing a new publication I have been privileged to lead as well as discussing the resulting advice and guidance for education stakeholders (parents, teachers, and administrators).
The full publication is available free online (yay for open source journals!) and can be found at this link:
Gruskin, K., Griffin, M., Bansal, S., Dickinson-Frevola, S., Dykeman, A., Groce-Volinski, D., Henriquez, K., Kardas, M., McCarthy, A., Shetty, A., Staccio, B., Geher, G., & Eisenberg, E. (2025). Stakeholders’ Roles in Evolutionizing Education: An Evolutionary-Based Toolkit Surrounding Elementary Education. Behavioral Sciences, 15(1), 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15010092
What follows is the elevator pitch version!
What You Need to Know
If you read anything on my Substack, you’ll quickly see the claim that children evolved to learn through collaborative, mixed-age, child-driven play and exploration (see, for example, my previous post here). These ideas are supported by the work done by researchers studying childhood learning in Hunter-Gatherer cultures (i.e., Gray, 2011).
However, modern classrooms—and modern childhood in general—is vastly different from these Hunter-Gatherer or ancestral conditions. This is the idea of evolutionary mismatch and can be theorized to contribute to many adverse outcomes such as an epidemic of childhood mental health issues, lower academic success and motivation, and overall school apathy and even hatred (see Gray, 2013). These are huge problems that must be addressed—so what are we to do?
Our recent paper proposes the need to “evolutionize” education. What we mean by this is the need to make modern classrooms more aligned with the way children have evolved to learn. By decreasing instances of evolutionary mismatch, we can help to decrease some of the adverse outcomes mentioned above.
Importantly, we are not proposing giant changes to the education system as we know it. For one, we know the education system is fairly resistant to change. Additionally, we believe that in our technologically and socially complex world, it is impossible to expect children to learn simply through play and exploration. The skills needed for success as an adult are too complex. Instead, we propose small changes that have the potential to have a lasting impact on student success (see Gruskin & Geher, 2018). Hence, we are not revolutionizing education, we are evolutionizing education.
Importantly, all stakeholders have a role to play if we wish to evolutionize education. You will see below that the Toolkits do overlap and work in conjunction. For example, teachers can’t focus on play if parents don’t support their child’s wholistic school experience. Parents can’t empower their children to explore their interests through unstructured activities if teachers assign tons of afterschool homework. Teachers can’t create hands-on lessons if administrators don’t provide funding for classroom tools and manipulatives. The list goes on and on. At the end of the day, everyone has a role to play and using the Toolkit is a great way to get that work started.
For each stakeholder, we recommend using the following strategies and prompts to reflect on your role in evolutionizing education. Ensure you describe how you would address the question prompt. Adding potential examples would be helpful. So grab a pencil and some paper and let’s get started!
What Parents Can Do
The Toolkit for parents focuses on developing what we call an evolutionarily-informed parenting style. The paper (linked above) has all the research supporting these ideas, below is the Toolkit outlining the strategies, some ideas, and a thought prompt for each to get you started. For parents, we suggest focusing on the home environment and their upbringing, empowering your child, and allowing time for unstructured activities. By prioritizing the strategies outlined below, parents have the potential to decrease evolutionary mismatch at home and support the work being done to decrease mismatch at schools.
What Teachers Can Do
Similar to the Toolkit for parents, the Toolkit for teachers is outlined below. The five components of the table reflect teaching practices that, when utilized in the classroom, help to make education more aligned with students’ evolved learning mechanisms. By focusing on collaboration, active and hands-on learning, student voice, real-world connections, and play, teachers can help to improve educational outcomes for modern students. These are likely strategies that teachers already use to some degree, but the evolutionary reasoning shines a light on why these strategies matter and why they should be prioritized.
What Administrators Can Do
Lastly, the administrator Toolkit looks a little different as the table focuses on different levels of administration and what unique role each level plays in the American Education System. Further, each level supports the work done by the level beneath. Overall, administrators have the potential to make the largest changes by focusing on their roles such as resource allocation, curriculum development, and teacher support. Administrators should seriously consider their roles in evolutionizing education to help meet the learning needs of all students.
Takeaways
While the ideas proposed to evolutionize education are not new or revolutionary, they are powerful. An understanding of evolutionary educational psychology helps education stakeholders (parents, teachers, and administrators) understand childrens’ evolved learning mechanisms and how these mechanisms play out in modern classrooms. This understanding, in conjunction with the use of the Toolkit, has the potential to improve our system of education. This work is important and we recommend that all who are involved in education read the paper in its entirety to understand the complexities and rationale behind our proposals. At the end of the day, students are our shared future and, as such, all stakeholders should think critically about their role in evolutionizing education.
I am thrilled to have had the priviledge to work with all the authors involved in this paper as well as everyone else in Glenn Geher’s Evolutionary Psychology lab. Eleven of the authors on this paper are students or recent graduates who put in a ton of time and effort on this project. I am so proud of all who were involved! I hope whoever reads this walks away with some strategies to begin evolutionizing education. It matters!
References:
Gray, P. (2011). The special value of children’s age-mixed play. American Journal of Play, 3, 500–522.
Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Gruskin, K., & Geher, G. (2018). The Evolved Classroom: Using Evolutionary Theory to Inform Elementary Pedagogy. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 12, 1-13.
Gruskin, K., Griffin, M., Bansal, S., Dickinson-Frevola, S., Dykeman, A., Groce-Volinski, D., Henriquez, K., Kardas, M., McCarthy, A., Shetty, A., Staccio, B., Geher, G., & Eisenberg, E. (2025). Stakeholders’ Roles in Evolutionizing Education: An Evolutionary-Based Toolkit Surrounding Elementary Education. Behavioral Sciences, 15(1), 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15010092