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The purpose of this study is to argue that formal education had multiple, independent origins in the emergence of ancient civilizations, for universally the same reasons. It uses socio-biological literature to outline the nature of human societies; ethnographic literature to show that no systems of formal education existed in small-scale hunter-gatherer communities; and evolutionary psychological literature, specifically the cognitive niche theory of human evolution, and domain-specific brain module theories, to show how children learn. The second section details the organizational changes that occurred in the emergence of civilization and why this required the development of formal institutions of education. The study uses four ancient civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica—to provide evidence for the paper's argument. The study offers a theory for the relationship between the structural organization of human societies and the implications this has for social learning. Overall, it provides a working theory for how and why formal education first emerged in human societies, due to the administrative tools needed to keep a state-level society functioning.

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Journal of Education and Learning; Vol. 9, No. 2; 2020

ISSN 1927-5250 E-ISSN 1927-5269

Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

How and Why Formal Education Originated in the Emergence of

Civilization

Tyrel C. Eskelson1

1 Faculty of Education, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

Correspondence: Tyrel C. Eskelson, Faculty of Education, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. E-mail:

tycameroneskelson@hotmail.ca

Received: December 20, 2019 Accepted: January 25, 2020 Online Published: February 5, 2020

doi:10.5539/jel.v9n2p29 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/jel.v9n2p29

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to argue that formal education had multiple, independent origins in the emergence of

ancient civilizations, for universally the same reasons. It uses socio-biological literature to outline the nature of

human societies; ethnographic literature to show that no systems of formal education existed in small-scale

hunter-gatherer communities; and evolutionary psychological literature, specifically the cognitive niche theory of

human evolution, and domain-specific brain module theories, to show how children learn. The second section

details the organizational changes that occurred in the emergence of civilization and why this required the

development of formal institutions of education. The study uses four ancient civilizations—Mesopotamia, Egypt,

China, and Mesoamerica—to provide evidence for the paper's argument. The study offers a theory for the

relationship between the structural organization of human societies and the implications this has for social

learning. Overall, it provides a working theory for how and why formal education first emerged in human

societies, due to the administrative tools needed to keep a state-level society functioning.

Keywords: formal education, hunter-gathere rs, societal organization, teaching, literacy, ancient civilizations,

social learning

1. Introduction

For most of human history, people lived in small hunter-gatherer societies. The structure of these societies, and

the environment they inhabited, had great implications for how children learned to become effective members of

their society. Children in all societies have the ability to learn large amounts of skills and cultural knowledge

through observation, imitation, socialization, and play. As the ethnographic literature used in this study will show,

no systems of formal education, or even direct instructional guidance was necessary to transmit these important

skills and knowledge to the next generation. Formal education had its origins in the emergence of state-societies

starting more than 5000 years ago.

This paper will answer how and why formal education first emerged in state-societies. To do this, it will begin

with an account of how children learn, and why formal education was not needed in small-scale communities

such as hunter-gatherer societies. Next, this study will detail the structural and organizational changes that

occurred in the transition from small-scale hunter-gatherer societies to large, complex state-societies. In addition,

evidence from four ancient civilizations will serve as case studies for the emergence of formal education. The

final section will review modern psychological evidence for why direct instructional guidance is necessary to

learn literacy, numeracy, and scientific concepts. In the conclusion, some implications this study has for our

modern understanding of formal education.

2. The Nature of Social Learning

Learning and development are a common feature of life, yet education is strictly a human phenomenon. Societies

are rooted in human nature (Chapais, 2008; Moffett, 2013, 2019; Wilson, 2012), and it is impossible to conceive

of an education that is not social in nature. The key stages of learning and development that humans progress

through, from birth to mature adult, are dependent on development within a society. The society shapes all stages

of human experience and education is a result of human's social evolution and adaptation.

The concept of a niche in evolutionary models provides a coherent explanation of human's complex

specializations and adaptations. Tooby and DeVore (1987) have proposed the term "cognitive niche" as an

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evolutionary model for human's "zoological distinctiveness." They explained that "humans are characterized by

a remarkable expansion in intelligence, consciousness (however defined), complex learning, and culture

transmission mechanisms—all interpenetrated by a sophisticated coevolved motivational system" (p. 235). The

nature of education in human societies, and the reason it is strictly a human phenomenon, is rooted in these

evolutionary distinctions.

Other animals show impressive capabilities for extended periods of learning and future planning (de Waal, 2016;

Mulcahy & Call, 2006), but semantically, it is useful to have a concept that delineates the unique cognitive

capacities of human beings. Education, therefore, is the process of social learning, and skills and knowledge

attainment, that human children acquire to become competent members of their society. If education is strictly a

human phenomenon, then education has its origins in the cognitive evolution of our species. The cognitive niche

predicts that the success of anyone member in their society is dependent upon this education. Following evidence

from the ethnographic literature, this study argues that not all societies use teaching or formal education. So,

when did human societies first utilize formal education to transmit skills and knowledge?

For most of human history, people lived in small hunter-gatherer societies which consisted, on average, of

twenty-five to thirty individuals of several nuclear kinships (Lee, 1968). A band of individuals was part of a

larger band-society, which ranged from less than one-hundred, up to two-thousand individuals. Contemporary

hunter-gatherer societies serve as a useful model for how our Paleolithic ancestors lived, though there are

limitations to this comparison (Renfrew, 2007, p. 119). The usefulness in comparison lies in the size,

organization, and dynamics of the group (Karl, 1989), and the similarities across culturally-distinct groups.

What is common across all human social organization is the phenomena of ingroup/outgroup distinctions, and

fission-fusion patterns of movement. In addition to these social phenomena, hundreds of human universals have

been identified (Brown, 2004), as well as little to no genetic diversity between different human populations

(Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003, p. 173). It is in this common nature that human societies have been able to

function, in various ecological settings, with as few members as a hunter-gatherer band, or scaled up to societies

comprised of millions of individuals, all sharing a common identity. Individual recognition of each member is

not necessary (Moffett, 2019. p. 79, 92), but the recognition of markers of identity, such as language, dress,

gestures, storytelling, and permissible social behavior, is vital.

The society frames all human activity within the opportunities and limitations it provides. From birth, infants

develop a strong sense of membership to their society, including clear distinctions from other groups, a social

phenomenon labeled ingroup and outgroup. Human beings have innate needs for inclusion within their group, as

well as clear distinctions from foreign groups (Leonardelli, Pickett, & Brewer, 2010; Brewer, 1991, 2007). All

humans have a fundamental motivation to belong, form social attachments, resist losing these social attachments,

and this desire shapes our cognition by producing positive and negative emotions according to changes in bonds

(Baumeister & Leary, 1995, p. 520). "Subjective Well Being" has been shown to be connected, not just to

personal need fulfillment, but also the fulfillment of societal needs (Tay & Diener, 2011, p. 363).

Brewer (2007), and her colleagues (Leonardelli et al., 2010) have developed the theory of "optimal

distinctiveness" to explain social identity, social cognition, and intergroup relations. The optimal distinctiveness

theory states that our sense of security is maximized from ingroup/outgroup distinctions (Brewer, 2007 p. 735).

Others have found that these ingroup preferences develop early and are important for survival in social species

(Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2008, p. 252). One of the strongest social markers for ingroup /outgroup distinctions

is language. For example, a series of experiments provided evidence that infants develop an early social

preference for members of one's native language (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007). Ingroup/outgroup

distinctions, whether they are language and dress in humans, or chemical scents in ants, are a common

evolutionary survival strategy in many animal societies. The ingroup/outgroup phenomenon is further

well-demonstrated in those hunter-gatherer societies whose name for their own group, roughly translates to

"human" (i.e., Hadza, Yanomami, Ainu).

Hunter-gatherer bands are part of a larger band society dispersed across their territory. Members of one band

were free to split with one group and join another in a pattern of movement called fission-fusion. Fission-fusion

allows social animals the "benefit of living in larger communities whilst avoiding many of the associated costs,"

as well as "a means of ensuring that group size is optimal at any given time" (Grove, Pearce, & Dunbar, 2012, pp.

191–192). Individuals had the option to form temporary hunting or foraging groups, and the freedom to cultivate

friendships or avoid conflicts within the band society. Fission-fusion is not a product of cooperation, rather

cooperation is a feature of the ingroup/outgroup, fission-fusion nature of human societies. These characteristics

are present in all contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, and they are the reasons why human societies can scale

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up to millions of individuals. The scale of human societies has implications for how day-to-day social

interactions occur. Much anthropological work has focused on the nature of equality within small-scale societies.

James Woodburn (1982) labeled small-scale societies that immediately consume resources as egalitarian. This he

contrasted with the delayed-return systems common to agricultural and state-level societies. In small-scale

societies, the fission-fusion pattern of movement allowed for a "Fluidity of local grouping and spatial

mobility…reinforced by a set of distinctive egalitarian practices which disengage people from property, inhibit

not only political change but any form of intensification of the economy" (Woodburn, 1982, p. 431, 447).

Marlowe (2005) argued that the forager diet, gained from widely dispersed food sources, explains the egalitarian

social organization of small-scale societies. Others have argued that the nature of small-scale social organization

favors supressing inclinations towards dominance-based hierarchies (von Rueden, 2020, p. 169) through the

performance of counter measures (Erdal & Whiten, 1994, p. 177). The demand for fair distribution of resources

and the suppression of political leadership common in chiefdoms and state-level societies, seems to be a social

phenomenon of nomadic small-scale social organization.

In all human societies, people show the same basic aptitudes for communication, tool use, cooperation,

processing food, protecting each other from predators, raising children, and learning. The variations in ecological

conditions shape the nuances and cultural differences that emerge in each particular society's history. Universally,

children must learn the identity markers and relevant knowledge to become mature, contributive members of

their society. This social learning is critical for survival and reproduction (Gray, 2011, p. 28). From a young age,

children's work and play among mixed-aged groups can affect their reputation within the society; a reputation

which can persist into adulthood (Blurton-Jones, 2005, p. 108). Childhood is an important time in human lives,

where the trajectory of skills and knowledge acquisition has great importance for their futures.

A unique feature of human growth and development is the length of childhood (Leigh, 2001, p. 223). Laird

(1967) used a mathematical model to compare human growth to rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees, and found

two stages of growth in the latter, while finding three in the former. This extended period of childhood

dependency provides time for brain development, observing and developing technical skills such as tool making

and food processing. It is also time for socialization, play, and learning complex social roles and cultural norms.

In filling the cognitive niche, humans have developed intelligent ways of exploiting other plants and animal

species, but these skills and knowledge take time to acquire. Adults must provide for children while they acquire

these abilities. To explain the distinctive features of a long-life span and brain size, Kaplan and Robson (2002)

created a model that considered the simultaneous action of natural selection on brain size and longevity. Their

data shows that human calorie production is negative until the age of twenty, and does not peak until the age of

forty-five, "reflecting the payoff of long dependency" (p. 10224). For an example of this, Walker, Hill, Kaplan,

and McMillan (2002) studied Ache hunters of Eastern Paraguay, who rely on hunting for 80% of their diet, and

found that successful hunting techniques required intelligence and a period of learning that peaked later in life. A

recent meta-ethnic review found similar conclusions (Lew-Levy et al., 2017, p. 387).

Peter Gray (2011) has proposed a theory of "educative instincts" to explain how natural selection promoted

children's proclivities for learning social and technical skills. He surveyed the ethnographic literature and found

that in every hunter-gatherer society, children had to learn an enormous amount, adults did not direct children's

learning, children acquired the skills of their culture by playing at culturally valued activities, and this play

occurred in age-mixed groups (Gray, 2011, pp. 30–32). According to Gray's theory, "educative instincts have

much more to do with learning than with teaching (p. 29)." Much of the ethnographic literature observes that

children acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for survival with limited or no teaching. Evolutionary

psychology, specifically the domain-specific view of how dedicated mechanisms are involved in the acquisition

of knowledge, has great explanatory theories for how children acquire such complex skills and knowledge

through observation.

The cognitive niche theory predicts that humans use information and inference to gain access to and control of

resources from other organisms (Tooby & DeVore, 1987). This theory fits well with concept of humans as

hunters, trackers, and foragers (Whiten & Erdal, 2012). There is a growing literature which argues convincingly

for a domain-specific modular organization of the brain, where each domain is primed to respond to information

in the forms of social, biological, and physical ontology. Cognitive research suggests that our cognitive

architecture develops expectations and principles about the world which distinguish between solid inanimate

objects, living things, and intentional agency (Boyer & Barrett, 2005). The domains, which operate implicitly,

correspond to areas called "intuitive," "naïve," or "folk" knowledge, and evidence exists for a folk psychology,

folk biology, and folk physics.

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Folk psychology is responsible for an awareness of the self, as well as inferring the beliefs and desires of other's

behavior (Wellman & Gelman, 1992), also known as "theory of mind" (ToM). ToM is an ability found in all

normally-developed humans across culture (Scholl & Leslie, 1999). Folk psychology allows humans to negotiate

social relationships, infer people's mental states and intentions, and develop an awareness of the social

ingroup/outgroup. Baron-Cohen et al. (1999) have made evidence-derived arguments that ToM is independent of

measures of intelligence, executive functions, and reasoning about the physical world.

Folk physics is a domain for representing and navigating three-dimensional physical space. Baillargeon (2002)

has provided a comprehensive review of the literature and how it has evolved since Piaget's studies in the 1950s.

Evidence shows that an intuitive physics is responsible for explanations about: the trajectory of solid objects

(Kaiser et al., 1986); expectations about the solidity and continuity of solid objects (Spelke, 1990); and that "a

single conception of material bodies comprising, at least in part, the principles of cohesion, contact and

continuity," help infants perceive and reason about solid objects (Spelke & Van de Valle, 1993, p. 156). Another

separate domain exists to rank living things and distinguish them from man-made objects.

In every human society, plants and animals are intuitively understood to have a causal essence, and to be part of

a species group; an ability known as folkbiology (Atran, 1998). These groups are hierarchically ranked and allow

for expectations about the organism's physiology and behavior. In evolutionary terms, the ability to group

different plants and animals allows for the correct behavioral response in discerning edible and inedible plants,

predator and prey animals, and to make inferences about the properties of different organisms.

To distinguish between living things and man-made objects is dependent upon perceiving different aspects of

objects. One study demonstrated that four-year-olds will use conceptual knowledge of function and shape to

guide their word extensions to label same-appearance animals and same-function tools (Graham et al., 2010).

Another found that children produce more generic noun-phrases about animals than tools where they had no

prior knowledge (Brandone & Gelman, 2009). Studies on domain-specific modules of the brain organization

continue to accumulate important evidence for how humans learn and develop explanations for the world. The

flexibility to respond to variation in the environment is an important component to the cognitive niche theory of

social evolution.

When a species has recurrent problems in the ecosystem over the course of evolutionary history, blueprints or

algorithms for responding to these problems will evolve within the nervous system (Geary, 2007; Bugental, 2000,

p. 187). Individual differences in these primary domains manifest themselves in varying abilities in the social

and ecological context: be it hunting, tool making, or cultivating social relationships. These varying abilities are

an important context for evolutionary selection in fitness. All humans have a motivation to gain and maintain a

sense of control over themselves, their relationships, and the physical environment. This ability is essential for

evolutionary survival (Shapiro, Schwartx, & Astin, 1996, p. 1231). The underlying attentional and perceptual

mechanisms that deal with the social, biological, and physical world equip each individual with a cognitive

system that processes information, and guides behavioral responses. As these different abilities manifest

themselves at the social level, society provides its own sets of rules, norms, and limits for behavior. The benefits

of conforming to societal regulation are cooperation, reduced competition, and an increased dependence on other

members in the society. Children are biologically motivated to engage in activities such as social play,

exploration of the environment, and observing and imitating others, because these activities have recreated

fitness throughout human's evolutionary history. Analysis of learning in small-scale societies can provide an

interesting window into the nature of education in all human societies.

There is disagreement in the ethnographic record as to how to understand the nature of social learning and

cultural transmission in hunter-gatherer societies. Mead (1964) characterized hunter-gatherer band societies as

'learning cultures' because learners initiated the acquisition of skills and knowledge. This is contrasted with

'civilized' societies, which she characterized as 'teaching cultures.' In a recent review of the debate, Boyette and

Hewlet (2017, p. 1) claimed that "teaching clearly exists among hunter-gatherers and appears in many forms,"

but clarify the statement by saying that "teaching tends to be less common" among these small-scale societies.

An earlier study defined forms of teaching as observed among Aka hunter-gatherers: "Natural pedagogy,

demonstration, task assignment, positive and negative feedback, and opportunity scaffolding" (Hewlett &

Roulette, 2016, p. 10). This definition of teaching is too general and not easily differentiated from every day

social interaction.

The biggest issue in the debate on teaching in hunter-gatherer societies concerns an agreed-upon definition of the

concepts. If the term teaching is used in the context of a mathematics classroom, can it also be used to describe

normal social interactions, as the ones listed in the above-paragraph, that are "brief and subtle, often lasting a

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few seconds?" (Hewlett & Roulette, 2016, p. 10). This study finds a more suitable definition in Lancy (2010),

that teaching is "student-centered, developmentally appropriate instruction by dedicated adults" (p. 97), though

the last two words need not be the case.

This study offers an understanding of these concepts from a socio-biological perspective as follows: great

cognitive abilities for learning are common throughout the animal kingdom (de Waal, 2016) and human

education needs distinction from these abilities; education is the social learning and skills acquisition that occurs

only in human societies; teaching is not necessary to facilitate social learning and the acquisition of skills, where

observation and imitation suffice; formal education is direct instructional guidance to transmit evolutionarily

novel skills, knowledge, and concepts. Examples of these include literacy, mathematics skills, and scientific

conceptions of the world.

The learning Mead studied in hunter-gatherer societies is typical of small-scale societies. Children are innately

curious, and learning through observation and imitation are common to all children in any society. Despite the

on-going debate, the ethnographic literature overwhelmingly indicates that children in small-scale societies learn

through imitation and observation, and this includes complex skills such as the production of tools, or the skills

involved in effective hunting. These observations in the anthropological and ethnographic literature align with

models of social evolution and adaptation in humans. Hunter-gatherer societies do not rely on direct instructional

guidance in cultural and skills transmission because observation and imitation learning suffices.

Lancy (2008, 2010) has conducted a comprehensive review of the ethnographic record, which reviewed 1570

published and unpublished reports, comprehensive of geography and subsistence patterns. Lancy's research

(2010) of learning in hunter-gatherer societies concludes that teaching "is largely absent or of minor importance"

in children developing into "competent adults" (p. 82). In subsequent work, Lancy (2016, p. 6) finds no

connection between teaching and the acquisition of survival skills, which includes the lifelong development of

hunting and tool-making skills (Lancy, 2017, p. 13). Hunting is potentially the most intensive and

strength-demanding skill for children in hunter-gatherer societies to acquire (Walker et al., 2002). MacDonald

(2007) reviewed the ethnographic literature to test predictions from evolutionary models of the costs and benefits

of learning to hunt at different ages. She found "few descriptions in the literature of teaching or verbal

instruction," and that "teaching is unimportant relative to observation and practice" (p. 398). Among the Nayaka

hunter-gatherers of southern India, caring for children as dependents ends at around three to four years of age,

and by the age of six, children begin hunting and visiting relatives free of parental supervision (Bird-David, 2005,

p. 96). Among the Nayaka, there is "no formal instruction and memorizing (here), no classes, no exams, no

cultural sites in which packages of knowledge, abstracted from their context, are transmitted from one person to

another" (Bird-David, 2005, p. 96). Similar results have been observed among the Martu children in the Western

Desert, Australia (Bird & Bliege-Bird, 2005, p. 145). Diamond (2012), in his study on small-scale societies,

found that education occurs from natural social interactions and that New Guinean Highlanders found it "bizarre"

that "children need specified places, times, and instruction in order to learn how to meet and play with each other"

(p. 206).

Indeed, children in small-scale societies, before the advent of civilization, had a great deal to learn as part of

their social education, but no systems of teaching or formal education existed in their societies. This study argues

that the emergence of civilization had major implications for the education of some members of society. In order

to understand why formal institutions of education first emerged, it is pivotal to understand the changes in social

organization that likewise occurred during the emergence of civilization.

3. The Emergence of Civilization and Formal Education

This study will use four independently-emerging civilization case-studies to provide evidence for the

development of institutions of formal education. The emergence of state-level societies scaled human social

organization to a new complex dynamic, a phenomenon which happened independently in several parts of the

world. In ancient Mesopotamia (Adams, 1981; Algaze, 2001, 2008), Egypt (Kemp, 1989), China (Trigger, 2003;

Wang, 2014; Wang, 2015), and Mesoamerica (Houston, 2004; Law, 2015; Smith, 2002), establishing cities was

the most discernible phase of the transition from small-scale societies and political chiefdoms to civilizations. In

the ancient world, cities are only found in state-level societies (Smith, 2002, p. 4).

The transition to cities and civilization required several concurrent geographic, social, political, technological,

and cultural aspects that began happening more than 5000 years ago; observed first in Ancient Mesopotamia and

Ancient Egypt. Geographically, the most salient features in the early development of Mesopotamian and

Egyptian civilizations was population growth, enhanced agricultural production, and the means to transport and

distribute along rivers. This distribution, along with a sufficient army to acquire new territories and protect

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trading, created dense city structures that over time attracted new members. These state-level societies also had

agreed-upon definitions of symbols that played new roles in mediating behavior within society. For example,

societies that developed standardized units of weight measurement, had innovated a system that symbolized and

quantified new properties in the material and abstract world (Renfrew, 2007). These innovative ways of engaging

with the material and abstract world created new valued skills and knowledge, which helped society function;

chief among them literacy and numeracy.

The ruling elite developed new bureaucratic institutions to work out social problems, and manage the production

and distribution of resources. Social stratification and the division of labor were new features of management,

and with their establishment, societies were able to control and rule vast territories. This level of social

organization created complex problems for which institutions had to find solutions, and this often meant a strong

degree of state control. Administrations and bureaucracies oversaw and directed the production of textiles and

agriculture, the transport and organization of troops, the sale of land or animals, the extraction of resources from

the surrounding territory, as well as how to observe the rituals in religious ceremonies or showing proper respect

to the king.

The development of state-level societies required the absorption of neighboring societies, but once established,

cities became attractive places for work and protection, even though the downsides included greater risk for

disease and, for many, an increased reliance on others. Increased density among a sedentary population created

new social dynamics as well as increased opportunities for problems. Modern studies of city density have shown

that "large size differentially affects the managerial, communicative, and professional and technical structure of

social systems," as well as "the relative proportion of other administrative personnel" (Kasarda, 1974, pp. 26–27).

Overall, civilizations and their institutions created more complex social and economic relations.

Alan Fiske (1992) has argued that four models can describe the organizing principles of sociality: (1) Communal

Sharing (2) Authority Ranking (3) Equality Matching and (4) Market Pricing. The first three are observed in all

levels of social organization, but the fourth, market pricing, is a feature of the interactions that take place in

state-societies. According to Fisk, market pricing interactions "are those that are oriented toward prices, wages,

commissions, rents, interest rates, tithes, and taxes, and all other relationships organized in terms of cost-benefit

ratios and ratio nal calculations of efficiency or expected utility" (p. 692 Italics in original). While money is the

"prototypical (p. 692)" example of market pricing relations, this study will show in the section on Ancient Egypt,

a "rations administration" (Kemp, 1989, p. 171) can hold the same proportional distributive standards. The

relational structuring of market pricing in civilizations was possible through administrative innovation in

accountability.

Essential to the complexity of trade and distribution in a civilization is accounting, records, and bookkeeping. In

ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, administrators used writing to record economic

transactions, convey messages, record ritual texts, celebrate rulers, and preserve knowledge. Writing was a direct

administrative response to increased social and political complexity (Cooper, 2004, p. 72). The invention, spread,

and transmission of writing took enormous effort and energy on the part of the societies that developed these

systems. To develop a system of writing required an agreed-upon set of standards and rules as to what the

symbols represented (Schmandt-Besserat & Erard, 2008, p. 8). Bruce Trigger identified three different functions

that early recording systems served: First, the commemorating of kings and their deeds. Second, administrative

record-keeping associated with the receipt and ownership of goods, the sale of land, houses, slaves, and other

property, loans and other commercial agreements, royal decrees and regulations relating to commerce, and legal

proceedings concerning economic matters. Third, religious purposes such as the oracle bone inscriptions used for

divination in Shang China. (Trigger, 2003, p. 587) For the case-studies examined in this study, all three of

Trigger's observations are relevant to the development of writing systems; the second particularly exemplified in

the development of writing in ancient Mesopotamia.

4. Case Studies

4.1 Ancient Mesopotamia

In the period between 3500 B.C. and 3200 B.C., in Southern Mesopotamia, Uruk developed into the region's

largest city. This region benefited from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and higher yields than the surrounding

area in agricultural production (Algaze, 2008). Adams (1981, p. 85) found that by the Early Dynastic I times

(2900 B.C.–2350 B.C.), the city had expanded to a population of forty to fifty thousand inhabitants. Uruk played

an important role in the trade and manufacturing of the region because it had the ability to organize "the

long-distance procurement of certain commodities like metals, wood for heavy construction, precious stones, and

perhaps even ordinary flint and construction stones as well" (Adams, 1981, p. 80). As a regional center, raw

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materials flowed into the city to sustain work for skilled craftsmen and laborers. The sustainable feature of

Uruk's growth and economy was "that it brought a large and growing population within the compass of an urban

way of life" (Adams, 1981, p. 81) Central to the administration of the city was the development of writing

Proto-cuneiform texts begin to appear in Mesopotamia in about 3400 B.C (Trigger, 2004, p. 47; Englund, 2004).

By the Late Uruk period, around 3100 B.C., "real writing" appears, which according to Hans Nissen (1985)

provides "the ultimate answer to the problems of controlling economic life" (p. 352). Systems of writing allowed

institutions to store information and keep records of production and distribution. Cooper (2004) has argued that

"if we are looking for a common context for the invention of writing, a context which must also justify the

social and economic investment required to propagate and maintain a writing system, we would do well to

generalize from the Mesopotamian example and look to the administration of the kinds of organization and

polities that emerged in increasingly complex societies" (p. 80).

Writing took several centuries to develop from crude markers into a system of symbols that represented speech.

A consideration for further research is the degree to which this evolution relied on the development of formal

education. What is clear is that, for new generations to learn the craft of writing, institutions of formal teaching

emerged in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Those who undertook an education to become administrative scribes, attended schools known in Sumerian as

"Edubba" (George, 2005). Scribal schools taught children literacy, mathematics, and bureaucratic skills

necessary for work in the institutions of society. In addition to the thousands of administrative records that

survive on clay tablets, archaeologists have also found scribal exercises used in schools. In these schools, young

children learned sign-lists, lexical texts, and literary compositions. Literacy and mathematics were not just new

and enhanced tools in human societies, they also transformed the nature of education as well. Sumerian society

required schools to teach children, and teachers used discipline to keep children tasked on these new,

evolutionarily novel goals. This is reflected in many of the tablets, which contain passages concerning discipline

and strict authoritative guidance from instructors.

Samuel Noah Kramer (1956) found that towards the end of the fourth millennium B.C., "the Sumerians, as a

result of their economic and administrative needs, came upon the idea of writing on clay" (p. xxi), and that the

"school was the direct outgrowth of the invention and development of the cuneiform system of writing" (p. 3).

Kramer translated texts that showed "as early as 3000 B.C., some scribes were already thinking in terms of

teaching and learning" (p. 3). Texts from the first half of the second millennium B.C. show a widespread school

system that became the center of culture and learning in Sumerian civilization. Other texts provide evidence for

how difficult it was for children to learn literacy. Textual evidence shows scripts that range "from the sorry

scratches of the first-grader to the elegantly written signs of the far-advanced student to become a graduate"

(Kramer, 1956, p. 4).

In Kramer's "Schooldays" (1949) he translated texts that described the experiences of a school boy, and the

behavior and attitude of his teacher and parents. His translation of the texts is informative for both the discipline

involved in schools, as well as the importance of learning literacy in Ancient Sumeria:

"I spoke to my father of my hand copies, then

Read the tablet to him, (and) my father was pleased;

Truly I found favor with my father.

"I am thirsty, give me drink,

I am hungry, give me bread,

Wash my feet set up the bed, I want to go to sleep;

Wake me early in the morning,

I must not be late, (or) my teacher will cane me. (Italics in Original , Lines 10–17; p. 205)"

"I went to school.

In the tablet-house, the monitor said to me: "Why are late?" I was

afraid, my heart beat fast" (Line 21–22; p. 205).

According to Kramer's (1949) translation, any infraction such as talking out of turn, not keeping your head held

high, standing, leaving, could all result in corporal punishment. Steve Tinney (1998) examined the nature of

cuneiform teaching practices from tablets recovered in Nippur and Ur and found that a demanding schedule of

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repetition drills was key to teaching literacy.

In ancient Sumeria, the evidence is clear that the social and political complexity of the state-level society led to

the invention of writing for administrative purposes. The transmission and evolution of writing required the

emergence of institutions of formal education. If the goal of this study was to find the first school in human

history, perhaps it need not proceed further. However, civilizations emerged independently in several places

around the world, and they can provide comparative samples to formulate a universal theory for the emergence

of formal education. This study argues that formal education arose for the same reasons in all independently

emerging civilizations. The evidence from Ancient Egypt helps to support this conclusion.

4.2 Ancient Egypt

Egypt's civilization developed along the last 1000 kilometer stretch of the Nile River. Nile Valley settlements

grew in population over centuries of plentiful agricultural production. By the beginning of the 4th millennium

B.C. the First Dynasty consolidated a vast territory of communities, each already on the path towards

state-societies (Kemp, 1989, p. 98). The Naqada Predynastic culture that preceded the First Dynasty were

already utilizing two types of writing scripts, one for administrative purposes, and the other for royal display

(Trigger, 2004, p. 48). The first use of hieroglyphs was a part of the transition to the uniform material culture

consolidated in the First Dynasty in 3100 B.C.

Writing in Ancient Egypt developed at a similar time to that of Ancient Mesopotamia, but in the Egyptian case,

symbolic uses to celebrate the deeds of royalty seems to be just as important as administrative uses (Baines, 2005,

p. 171). This is not to downplay the role writing served in administration, but rather to highlight the importance

of symbolism and royalty in the Egyptian cultural context. Writing not only served an administrative purpose,

but played a key role in establishing the legitimacy of rulers and a subordinate mass who believed in the leader's

right to rule (Fukuyama, 2011, p. 42). The Egyptians utilized the written language to promote national identity

and distinguish themselves from other societies, and textual evidence shows "they took pleasure in this king of

thinking" (Kemp, 1989, p. 21). Literary texts helped develop a sense of community, but they also helped

maintain a highly-bureaucratized state-society.

The Egyptian civilization developed institutions for administrative control and distribution of resources. They

devised a system of taxation, and complex ways of measuring, inspecting, and controlling people's activities.

Though it remained a moneyless system, the distribution of "rations" in the form of wages required a level of

abstract thinking in ways comparable to money (Kemp, 1989). Just as in the Mesopotamian civilization, this

system of Egyptian institutions relied on scribes who could write, record, and perform calculations that involved

ratios and fractions. The computing and recording of taxes, drawing up of census lists for military and labor, and

the calculations required for massive building projects, all needed a large and well-trained bureaucracy. The

training of scribes and administrators required formal education that was first attached to the royal court.

The king's sons and the sons of the elite officials attended scribal training from the ages of five to ten, and then

continued for another decade as apprentices with allotted government officials. Pedagogical materials, recovered

from the Middle Kingdom, show students undertaking a curriculum that began with learning to write words in

the hieratic script, and progressing to simple stories and arithmetic calculations. By the Middle Kingdom, scribal

schools were known as the "Houses of Life" (Trigger, 2003, pp. 607–608). In the Ancient Egyptian civilization,

there was a clear understanding that learning literacy and mathematics would place you among members of the

elite in society. A document from 1290 B.C. records a father giving advice to his son:

"I have put you to school with the children of high of ficials, to teach and instruct you in this office which

will lead to power and authority" (James, 1984, p. 140).

"Be a scribe, it saves you from toil, it protects you from all manner of labor. Be a scribe. Your limbs will be

sleek, your hands will grow soft. You will go forth in white clothes, honoured, with courtiers saluting you"

(Kemp, 1989, p. 163).

Again, with Ancient Egypt, evidence shows a concurrent emergence of administrative record-keeping with

state-level societies. Over time, both Egypt and Mesopotamia developed systems of writing that represented the

spoken word, though this latter step need not happen. It appears that the Aztec, Inka, and West African

civilizations had forms of record-keeping but not written speech (Trigger, 2004, p. 40). This evidence suggests

that the structural organization of state-level societies, with hierarchies of administration and bureaucracy, is the

driving impetus for the emergence of formal institutions of education. The final two examples used in this study

offer less clear evidence for this crucial stage of development, but the descriptive power of the developing theory

can offer logical explanations, in the absence of evidence, in the development of civilization in China and

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Mesoamerica.

4.3 Ancient China

The development of civilization in Ancient China is not as well documented as the records in Mesopotamia and

Egypt, yet enough evidence exists to make some useful comparisons, which will serve to supplement the theory

proposed in this study. As with Mesopotamia and Egypt, this section's review of the development of ancient

cities in China is concerned with the advent of writing and state-society scales of organization.

The earliest evidence of writing used in Ancient China comes from the Shang Dynasty in the second millennium

B.C. (Bagley, 2004; Wang, 2014; Wang, 2015), and this is where the archaeological record also shows evidence

of an increased scale of urbanization. As this section will show, the historical record from the Shang Dynasty is

lacking in administrative documents or pedagogical material. Yet, compiling the existing evidence, alongside

comparisons of the rise of civilization in other parts of the world, can still provide enough clues to conclude that

the Shang Dynasty utilized writing for administrative matters, and would have needed formal education to train

scribes in these skills.

The origins of state formation in China come from two phases of development, in city-states known as Erlitou,

and later Erligang. Erlitou was located on the Yiluo River tributary of the Yellow River, and according to the

archaeological record, developed into an urban settlement around 1800 B.C. (Wang, 2014, p. 176). The city was

large enough to have a division of labor working in bronze, turquoise, and pottery workshops, workers who

would have needed to rely on others for agricultural production. It also seems likely that Erlitou was one of

several city-states throughout the region. Evidence suggests that agriculture had a gradual development for

thousands of years prior to the development of Erlitou (Jones & Liu, 2009).

The successor to Erlitou, Erligang, consolidated power in the territory around 1500 B.C., uniting city-states into

an empire. From this period, the archaeological record shows sign of a uniform material culture, with casted

bronze ritual vessels (Bagley, 1987, p. 16; Bagley, 1990, p. 9) and weapons found in several areas, and this was

most likely due to "a rapid military expansion, one that built fortified strongholds at strategic points" (Wang,

2014, p. 179). A king in the 13th century B.C.E., Wu Ding, moved his capital to Anyang, where most of the

earliest evidence for writing comes from.

From around 1200 B.C. Anyang, archaeologists have found writing on bronze vessels, and thousands of

inscribed cattle scapulae used in divination rituals, more commonly known as oracle bones. A remaining gap in

explaining the development of writing in Ancient China is due to the fact that, "the Anyang script has a repertory

of several thousands characters, well standardized in graphic form, and it is full writing, able to record connected

discourse" (Bagley, 2004, p. 190). To find evidence of a full writing system used for divination rituals, with a

complete lack of earlier proto-writing samples, nor writing samples used in the administrative rise of the Erlitou

and Erligang state-societies, leaves many unanswered questions. Did writing have a rapid onset? Was it

unnecessary for the successful functioning of administrative duties? Or perhaps, were other perishable materials

used for writing as well, materials such as bamboo and wood? There are many examples of writing on these

materials from the Zhou Dynasty in fifth century B.C. (Bagley, 2004, p. 217), so it would not be a stretch to

assume that the developing stages of Chinese civilization used them as well.

At this point, it is unreasonable to speculate further, however, it seems just as unreasonable to hypothesize that

the lack of evidence means that writing did not have its origins in administration. If we draw on the development

of writing in Egyptian civilization, with its duel functions in administration and royal decree, it provides a

plausible working hypothesis for the functions writing served in Ancient China as well. Indeed, the oracle bone

divination samples offer some promising clues that writing was not just the domain of diviners. As Keightley

(1996) put it, "Diviners were required to read the cracks in bone, to read the sounds the cracks made, to read the

portents in the world around them" (p. 72), a skill and practice that predated written literacy. In fact, the majority

of divination bones are not inscribed. Looking at this evidence, Wang (2014) argued that:

It was not communication with the spirits that drove the elaboration of a writing system in China. We

would be hard-pressed to explain how oracular responses conveyed by sets of cracks could call into

existence an extensive Shang lexicon that distinguished many kinds of plants and animals and their

numbers, ages, and colors, many personal names, and countless toponyms. As we have seen in other early

states, its was in the sphere of administration—where the overriding motive was to exert control and the

means of control was to make inventories and create accountability—that systematic exploration of the

classification nature of recording systems was fostered" (p. 183).

There are also examples of oracle bone divinations that refer to administrative concerns and portents for the

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future of the royal dynasty. Legitimacy in the Shang Dynasty was closely tied to a favorable spiritual connection

with the ancestors, and examples of divinations that are concerned with royal decrees are comparable to the role

writing played in the Egyptian Pharaoh's royal decrees.

Unlike the Mesopotamian and Egyptian rise of civilization, and the abundant surviving historical record, the rise

of civilization in ancient China still needs more archaeological research before these important questions can be

answered. The line of evidence presented in this paper, in support of the theory for how and why formal

education arises amidst increased scale of social organization, is in no way denied by the Chinese case-study, and

in fact provides solid theoretical ground to support the hypothesis that administrative writing and institutions of

formal education would have arisen around the time of the development of the Erlitou and Erligang

state-societies. This study draws similar conclusions from the evidence found in the rise of Maya civilization, a

rise that occurred in a period that largely overlaps that of the rise of Ancient Chinese civilization.

4.4 Ancient Maya

The ancient Maya civilization has its origins in the Preclassic period (4000 B.C.–250 C.E.). In the succeeding

Classic period (250 CE–900 CE), a collage of city-states flourished and competed throughout the Maya region,

an area covering the Yucatan Peninsula down to present-day El Salvador and Honduras. The Maya territory

consisted of coastal plains, highlands, and lowland tropical forests. The cities that developed in these regions

served as "specialized centers for administration, manufacturing, commerce, and religion, and therefore served

the same purpose as other ancient cities" (Sharer, 1994, p. 71). As in the cases of Egypt and China, Maya cultural

traditions of political legitimacy were closely tied to the economic, sociopolitical, and ideological frameworks

that regulated the functioning of their state-societies (Sharer, 1994). Unlike other ancient state-societies, the

Maya city-states did not politically unify under one central authority, but rather remained a "patchwork of more

than 60 kingdoms" (Martin & Grube, 2008, p. 7).

Though scholars are developing excellent studies of the Preclassic and Classic polities; of their language and

writing, agricultural practices, and even daily life; more years of study of this civilization are needed to fill in

present gaps in knowledge (Houston & Garrison, 2015). The inclusion of Maya as an example in this study will

be to show that all the features that led to the development of formal education in the above-stated societies,

were also present in Ancient Maya civilization. Through comparative inference using the theory explained in this

paper, all of the encompassing evidences in the Maya historical and archaeological record suggest that they

would have needed formal institutions of education to maintain the cultural transmission of their complex, and

ornate, writing system.

There is still on-going research into the origins and development of Maya Preclassic writing (Saturno, Stuart, &

Beltran, 2006; Chase et al., 2009; Houston & Garrison, 2015). Scholars are converging on the Olmec heartland

site of La Venta, an area 80 kilometers south of the Gulf of Mexico, and western-adjacent to the Yucatan

Peninsula, as the place where the earliest writing emerged (Martinez et al., 2006; Law, 2015, p. 170). Maya

writing had its origins in the 1000 years before the Classic period in an era of warring chiefdoms who depicted

their conquests (Postgate, Wang, & Wilkinson, 1995, p. 471) At the time of the Classic period, urban centers

used a fully-developed and complex system "that combines logographic and phonetic signs" (Law, 2015, p. 158),

which could represent the spoken word.

The geographical variation of the dispersed city-states meant that each had territorial advantages and

disadvantages in resources. Agricultural practices in Maya civilization are different to the kinds that fueled the

development of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese cities, yet in the Maya case, it was still "crucial to the rise

of Maya civilization" (Sharer, 1994, p. 81). Different practices such as swidden, terracing, and gardening

developed according to the various geographic conditions. Those areas favorable to intensive food production

allowed for larger settlements, and larger populations, as exemplified in afore-mentioned examples, created the

need for new social organization.

As a case-study, Ancient Maya cities exhibit extensive trade, urban populations, systems of complex writing, and

all the other details of a functioning complex state-society. The numerous ar tefacts that depict Classic period

Maya writing show a corpus of royal inscriptions concerned with divine kingship. Martin and Grube (2008) have

argued that the change from Preclassic to the Classic period also showed a distinct change in "emphasis on the

relationship between kingship and the cosmos." In ways comparable to how Egyptian Pharaohs established

political legitimacy, the Maya royal texts recognized the divine "arrival" of their founding dynasties (p. 17).

What has not yet been found in the Maya historical record is administrative records.

The lack of administrative record-keeping, like in the China case-study, is frustrating, when considered alongside

the Mesopotamia and Egyptian examples. As Law (2015), put it, there are "no records of accounting, monitoring

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of production or tribute, communications with outlying centers, pedagogical materials, and other essentials of a

burgeoning state" (p. 176). Given the role record-keeping played in the emergence of other civilizations, the

logical conclusion is that it also played a major role in Maya city-states, they have just not survived, or are yet to

be found. There is evidence from the Classic period that the Maya used bark paper to write on and make books,

and this could be why these materials have not survived in the historic record. Law (2015) rightly questioned that

"If the emerging administrative complexity of large city-states was not the principal motivation behind the

development of Maya writing…then why did writing seem to burst on the scene at essentially the same time as

large urban centers with large-scale monumental architecture and the institution of kingship?" (p. 178). More

research is needed to answer these questions, but the encompassing evidence presented in this study allow for

confident expectations in the future of Maya studies.

Maya civilization was a vast network of city-states that traded, engaged in warfare, intensive agriculture, had

powerful kings and bureaucracies to administer their will; and as this paper hypothesizes, this would have

required a dedicated scribal tradition that taught these important skills to the next generation of administrative

scribes. As Law et al. (2015) similarly concluded:

"Training is indispensable if a record-keeping system is to be kept alive and functional… The literate

civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica all have a long history of script use—in the

first three cases more than 3000 years—so they clearly had effective means for teaching the scribal art."

Unlike the scribal exercises found in Mesopotamia and Egypt, little has been found in the Maya archaeological

record. However, the overall historic and archaeological record shows abundant evidence that points to a scribal

tradition as necessary in the functioning of the Ancient Maya civilization.

Overall, these four studies have provided ample evidence to support the theory that the emergence of formal

education in human history happened independently alongside the increase in the scale of social organization.

The lack of administrative and pedagogical materials in the last two case-studies, presents challenges, but in no

way negates the theory proposed in this study. As the relevant literature attests, much of the scholarly opinions is

in agreement that writing accompanied the rise of administration and bureaucracy, and that formal education

accompanied writing.

The final section will add evidence from modern understandings of literacy learning, to support the claim that

formal education had to accompany the development of literacy in Ancient civilizations.

5. Why Formal Education Emerged with Civilization

The skills required in the administrations and bureaucracies of these new civilizations were pivotal to organizing

and maintaining society. The new states were stratified in a hierarchical structure that created institutions and

exerted strong control over trade, enforcing laws, and providing a new social reality that structured the dynamic

interactions of commerce, production, distribution, and punishment. The skills required by bureaucrats and

ruling elite to govern new institutions were centered on literacy and numeracy.

The transmission of these skills from one generation of ruling elite and bureaucrats to the next generation,

required an institution of formal instruction, or school; the first schools in their respective societies. Formal

education was necessary for civilization to operate, and likewise, the requirements of civilization were the

impetus to develop the world's first schools. It should be noted that the functioning of society did not require that

everyone train in these new skills. As in the case of Egypt, learning literacy was seen as a way to join the elite

status of society. In other words, to obtain a skill that few others possessed. This in varying measures, remained

the case in societies until the 20th Century. In ancient societies, those who worked in administration and

bureaucracy needed the requisite skills to perform their duties.

The reason these skills required formal teaching is due to the afore-mentioned evidence in learning through

primary domains. Simply stated, literacy is an evolutionarily novel skill that needs organized, formal instruction,

over a long period of learning, in order to become mastered. Evolutionary psychological literature has shown

that children are motivated to learn information that aligns with the primary domains of folk knowledge. Literacy,

numeracy, and scientific concepts present a gap between primary domains of learning, and what Geary (2007)

has called secondary domains of learning. There has been great progress in the past twenty years to align theories

of educational psychology with these evolutionary understandings (Carey, 2000; Geary, 2000, 2002, 2007; Lancy,

2010; Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006; Pinker, 1997, 2010).

Philip Gough (1980) has noted about children that "for all his cognitive and linguistic talents, the child has one

peculiar linguistic shortcoming: he cannot read a word. Indeed, that is one of the primary reasons why we now

send him to elementary school" (p. 179). While it is only since the 20th century that we strive to teach all

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children this ability, those selected few children in ancient state-societies were cognitively no different in their

need to attend school to learn literacy. There is ample evidence to support this conclusion. Children have to make

a major cognitive effort learning to read (Ashby & Rayner, 2012, p. 61). Learning to read involves utilizing the

visual systems to process written symbols and integrating it with the system that comprehends these images into

language-based sounds (Simos et al., 2005). Literacy skills, along with all other skills, requires committing them

to long-term memory, and during the process of learning, relies on an engagement between the working memory

and long-term memory (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006). Evidence shows that direct instruction facilitates

this process of learning (Connor et al., 2004, p. 695) Similar struggles arise when learning scientific concepts

that do not match human folk knowledge concepts of the world.

Concepts correspond to the mental representation of single word objects or ideas, and often scientific

explanations require us to mentally change our folk representations. All normally-developed humans have the

capacity for concept change, but it is "extremely difficult" to do, and "the main barrier to learning…is not what

the student lacks, but what the student has , namely, alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the

phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach" (Carey, 2000; 14 Italics in original). Spelke and

Kinzler (2007) similarly conclude that

"Although core conceptions are resilient, they can be overcome. The history of science and mathematics

provides numerous examples of fundamental conceptual changes that occurred as thinkers became aware of

the mismatches between the principles governing their reasoning and the world of phenomena they sought

to understand" (p. 93).

These studies not only provide excellent evidence to inform pedagogical approaches in modern schools, but also

provide further evidence why formal education arose at times when societies started utilizing writing, numeracy,

and compiling scientific conceptions of the world.

This paper has provided a theory for why formal education arose concurrently with the rise of civilization in

Mesopotamia, Egypt, and plausibly in China and Mesoamerica too. The function of formal education in these

emergent ancient societies was to organize learning for children to acquire biologically secondary competencies

(Geary, 2007). For the first time in human history, the knowledge and skills needed, at least by some sector of

the society, presented a gap between children's innate learning abilities and the novel skills of literacy, numeracy,

and scientific concepts. The corpus of evidence presented in this study supports this conclusion and gives ample

theoretical room for future studies.

How does this study weigh on the current educational learning, literature debate between constructivist,

self-guided learning strategies versus direct instructional guidance strategies of learning? The evidence clearly

demonstrates that children are best left to learn on their own, where observation and imitation suffice. In

traditional hunter-gatherer societies, this is exemplified in children's innate motivational bias for play, socializing

in mixed-aged groups, and practicing important hunting and foraging skills. As many studies have shown,

learning these important skills did not require formal instruction.

In attaining knowledge and skills that require evolutionarily novel learning, such as literacy, numeracy, scientific

concept change, children need direct instructional guidance from teachers. Mayer (2004) reviewed the

self-guided learning literature from the 1950s to the 1980s and found evidence that proponents of self-guided

learning keep inventing new names and theories, yet the underlying approach has remained the same throughout

the thirty years in question. Mayer (2004) concluded that "the debate about discovery has been replayed many

times in education but each time, the evidence has favored a guided approach to learning" (p. 18).

Modern evolutionary psychology and neuroscience adds further evidence for why formal education arose in

ancient state-level societies. Children needed structured schools when the knowledge and skills they were

required to learn became too difficult to acquire by observation and imitation. Formal education, or schools,

emerged in civilizations that utilized writing, "market pricing" in economics, and new scientific conceptions of

how the world worked. Society could not transmit these skills and knowledge without formal instructional

guidance, and a dedicated institutional system that valued these skills for the day-to-day operating of society. All

normally developing children have the capacity to learn these skills and knowledge, but it requires teaching, and

hopefully in the future, teaching that is better aware of our cognitive architecture and the respective strengths and

weaknesses that lie therein.

6. Conclusion

By way of conclusion, this study proposes several points of summary and predictions for the future of this theory

of education:

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1) Education is strictly a human phenomenon.

2) Formal education first emerged in civilizations that developed the bureaucratic and administrative need for

literacy, numeracy, and market pricing.

3) The historical independent emergence of formal education in several ancient societies is a universal

phenomenon because it arises from human nature and the structural organization of societies.

4) Future scholars studying the Early Uruk period, for the transition from proto-cuneiform, to writing that

represents speech, may consider that formal education played a major role in this development. As the

archaeological and historic record expands in other emergent civilizations, again we can ask what role formal

education played in the development of writing? For example, is the development of a writing system dependent

on a few innovative people, or is the institutional repetition of teaching over the course of generations the way

that writing evolves? This study suspects that the latter explanation will emerge as the answer to this interesting

question.

5) We may predict that in civilizations such as the Indus Valley, which had systems of writing (yet to be

deciphered) and advanced trading networks, that an institution of formal education existed within their

civilization.

6) Finally, this theory of education can be falsified if we can show examples of formal education to have

independently emerged in small-scale societies where observation and imitation might otherwise have been more

parsimonious to learning.

The four examples of independently-emerging civilizations used in this study allow for valuable comparisons,

yet this style of comparison requires caution not to extrapolate similarities beyond the evidence. Mesopotamia,

Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica, despite their unique features and differences in the time of historical

development, offer strong cases of convergence when analyzing the structural dynamics of state-level societies.

Independent of each other, these civilizations built cities that functioned as the political, administrative, and

religious centers of their respective societies. The institutions that developed within each society kept records of

production, distribution, trade, taxes, religious ceremonies, military mobilizations, and relied on record-keeping

and eventually the written word to maintain a functioning system. Whether writing developed for administrative

purposes, religious divination, political legitimacy, or some mixture of each, the salient fact is that these systems

of recording, storing information externally, and communication all required a dedicated institution ready to

transmit these valuable skills to the next generation. As this study has shown, the transmission of literacy and

numeracy skills required systems of formal education, because the skills and knowledge were evolutionarily

novel, and therefore inherently difficult to learn.

This aim of this paper was to introduce a coherent and evidence-based theory about how and why formal

education arose in the course of human history. The value of this theory has great potential for further studies.

For example, Mesoamerican archaeologists and Maya language experts are still advancing knowledge in several

areas surrounding the development of Mesoamerican civilization. As of yet, scholars have not found direct

evidence of institutions of formal education, but all converging evidence, and drawing inferences from other

civilizations suggest that some type of scribal school must have existed in the Maya civilization. Likewise, the

development of the Shang China civilization must have developed a system of formal education to train scribes

and administrative officials. There is also great potential that systems of formal education played a major role in

the transition from record-keeping to writing that represents speech.

Finally, this study provides a socio-biological understanding for education as a human phenomenon, and a theory

for the origins of formal education in the development of state-societies. The development of civilizations

changed the concept of education, and with each subsequent century of innovation, it continues to become more

difficult to become educated. In the 21st century, when societies place so much time, effort, energy, and

resources into education policies, it is vital that we place an understanding of human nature at the center of

education. Societies are deeply embedded within our human nature, and both in turn provide the limits,

potentials, and possibility of education.

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license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

... Formal education is conceptualized as goal-directed instruction of evolutionarily novel concepts, skills, and abstract ideas. This definition encompasses any learning related to literacy, numeracy, scientific concept change, abstract rules and ideas, and certain forms of human coordination such as military training or using time to order society (Carey, 2000;Geary, 2007;Lancy, 2010Lancy, , 2012Lancy, , 2016Eskelson, 2020). This paper uses these conceptualizations to analyze early-modern Europe. ...

... This led to the creation of formal education to pass literacy and numeracy skills on to the next generation of administrators. (Eskelson, 2020). Historically, the structure of formal institutions, specifically the bureaucracy, administrations, and legal systems of states, as well as religious or spiritual institutions, have had a direct relationship to what formal education is needed in a society. ...

Tyrel C. Eskelson

The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in Western European countries during the Middle Ages were below twenty percent of the population. For most countries, literacy rates did not experience significant increases until the Enlightenment and industrialization. Two early exceptions to this broad trend were the Netherlands and England, which had achieved literacy rates above fifty percent of their populations by the mid-seventeenth century. The explanations for these divergent trends are the structural changes in formal institutions that embodied capital markets, protected private property, and overall established the initial steps in developing modern political institutions. This created incentives to invest more in schools per capita as well as incentives for a middle class to invest more in literacy and numeracy skills for a market-exchange economy that was becoming more specialized in division of labor.

... The first people in the region to reach the complexity that historians today call civilization. They had done this around 3100 BC and developed a civilization in which city-states formed over the next 7 centuries [24]. Before them, several independent city states existed simultaneously, some of which were in fierce competition with each other. ...

Justas Streimikis
Liudmila Kortenko
Marina Panova
Mikhail Voronov

This paper is centred around the development of a smart city information system. Smart cities use the framework of information and communications technologies to create, deploy and promote practices that address urban challenges and create, connect and enable sustainable infrastructure. This definition focuses on network deployment, transport, ICT investment, human and social capital to support sustainable community goals and quality of life by involving users of certain technologies and community-based applications in social participation. In this paper, we show that a multi-disciplinary approach is needed to address these issues, combining expertise from distributed systems, software and services engineering, network and data management and processing, crowdsourcing, sensor and update methods, social computing, as well as the collective intelligence.

Ilias Boikos

The history of human presence on Earth is a unique and complex phenomenon central to human knowledge in its various forms. Contemporary Science examining Human and human development is organized in multiple disciplines and bodies of knowledge lacking common concepts and methodologies. However, as knowledge regarding human grows, new interdisciplinary research fields emerge, trying to solve complex issues not solved by traditional scientific disciplines. In the context of this thesis, the different ways in which various scientific disciplines examine Human and human development have been reviewed, as well as the historical and contemporary unifying theories regarding these matters. This research led to proposing a Model for the research of Human Development as a single process through time (Human Development Model). The Model is based on the interaction of three factors that define Human and Human Development: 1. Nature, as the material conditions of human existence, 2. Society, referring to human relationships, 3. Knowledge, describing accumulation, organization and transmission of information, behaviors and bodies of knowledge. Setting the foundations of this Model, the content of the three factors is described, combined with examples of Human Development that highlight the above interactions between the levels of organization of humanity and the interactions between research fields. Problem-solving and related transmission and accumulation of innovations through enculturation in its various forms are examined as a key mechanism for Human Development. In the context of solving contemporary global problems, the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are presented and the 169 targets are categorized based on the three pillars of the Human Development Model (HDM) that has been proposed. Moreover, the documented interlinkages are examined and mapped. The results and the key conclusions of categorizing targets and mapping interlinkages are presented and discussed, examining the contribution of the HDM. A "road map" is drawn for clarification, prioritization and the assessment of problems, their circumstances, the role of stakeholders, but also for mapping SDGs interlinkages as a tool for development planning, problem solving and SDGs implementation. In the last section of this thesis, education is examined as a form of enculturation and its relation with human development through human history is being investigated. The relation between education and problem-solving is sought along with the place of education in nations' and humanity's planning, its socialization and education's development in accordance with the development of various human activities. Education and SDGs, Science Education and Environmental education are linked with Education for Sustainable Development. The relation between Education and Sustainable Development is examined in three distinct levels: 1. Sustainable Development, SDGs and the relevant scientific knowledge as content knowledge in education, 2. Educating people as a developmental force, 3. Education as a human activity under development planning. Finally, it is being proposed that these three levels of the relation between Education and Human Development can be further examined in the context of Human Development Model.

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime.

Adam H. Boyette
Barry S. Hewlett

Most of what we know about teaching comes from research among people living in large, politically and economically stratified societies with formal education systems and highly specialized roles with a global market economy. In this paper, we review and synthesize research on teaching among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The hunter-gatherer lifeway is the oldest humanity has known and is more representative of the circumstances under which teaching evolved and was utilized most often throughout human history. Research among contemporary hunter-gatherers also illustrates a complex pattern of teaching that is both consistent with and distinct from teaching in other small- and large-scale societies with different subsistence practices and cultural forms. In particular, we find that the cultural emphasis on individual autonomy and socio-political egalitarianism among hunter-gatherers differently shapes how teaching occurs. For example, teaching clearly exists among hunter-gatherers and appears in many forms, including institutionalized instruction in valued cultural and technical skills. However, teaching tends to be less common in hunter-gatherer societies because people live in small, intimate egalitarian, groups that support each other's learning in a variety of ways without teaching. Furthermore, foundational cultural schemas of autonomy and egalitarianism impact the nature of teaching. For example, adults and older children limit their interventions, permitting autonomous learning, and, when they occur, teaching episodes are generally brief, subtle, indirect, and situated in a present activity (i.e. knowledge is not objectified or intended to be generalizable). We discuss the implications of this research in terms of discussions of the evolution of human cognition and the co-evolution of teaching and culture through the process of cultural niche construction.

David F. Lancy

The overall goal of this paper is to derive a set of generalizations that might characterize children as tool makers/users in the earliest human societies. These generalizations will be sought from the collective wisdom of four distinct bodies of scholarship: lithic archaeology; juvenile chimps as novice tool users; recent laboratory work in human infant and child cognition, focused on objects becoming tools and; the ethnographic study of children learning their community's tool-kit. The presumption is that this collective wisdom will yield greater insight into children's development as tool producers and users than has been available to scholars operating within narrower disciplinary limits.

Barry S. Hewlett
Casey J. Roulette

A debate exists as to whether teaching is part of human nature and central to understanding culture or whether it is a recent invention of Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic cultures. Some social-cultural anthropologists and cultural psychologists indicate teaching is rare in small-scale cultures while cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists indicate it is universal and key to understanding human culture. This study addresses the following questions: Does teaching of infants exist in hunter-gatherers? If teaching occurs in infancy, what skills or knowledge is transmitted by this process, how often does it occur and who is teaching? The study focuses on late infancy because cognitive psychologists indicate that one form of teaching, called natural pedagogy, emerges at this age. Videotapes of Aka hunter-gatherer infants were used to evaluate whether or not teaching exists among Aka hunter-gatherers of central Africa. The study finds evidence of multiple forms of teaching, including natural pedagogy, that are used to enhance learning of a variety of skills and knowledge.

Christopher von Rueden

Humans have likely spent the vast majority of our history as a species in relatively egalitarian, small-scale societies. This does not mean humans are by nature egalitarian. Rather, the ecological and demographic conditions common to small-scale societies favored the suppression of steep, dominance-based hierarchy and incentivized relatively shallow, prestige-based hierarchy. Shifts in ecological and demographic conditions, particularly with the spread of agriculture, weakened constraints on coercion.

H.J. Nissen

The oldest known writing stems from Babylonia, around 3100 BC, and more than 4000 clay tablets and fragments from that period have been found in Uruk during German excavations. A fresh approach has been made finding that 85% of all texts are economic records, the remainder being the lexical texts; it is postulated that writing came into existence as a means to control the economy. The course of decipherment will be described and 700 out of the 1000 signs of the Archaic texts could be identified, possibly written in the Sumerian language. Finally the contents of the tablets, as far as they are understood, will be summarised.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339071191_How_and_Why_Formal_Education_Originated_in_the_Emergence_of_Civilization

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