Think about this: Before the advent of agriculture (a mere 10,000 years ago, which is a blink of an eye in an evolutionary timescale), all humans were nomadic. They lived primarily outside. They moved locations regularly to find food sources. And they lived in small, stable groups (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022).
Many modern scholars interested in humans from an evolutionary perspective are very interested in modern nomadic groups as something of a proxy for these ancestral conditions. Peter Gray (2011) became very interested in the topic of education in nomadic groups around the world. His main idea was that perhaps the many problems associated with modern public education in the industrialized world can be illuminated if we understand what education looks like in the nomadic world. From an evolutionary perspective, the idea here is that it might be the case that the education in nomadic groups might give us insights into the features of education that human minds evolved to experience.
And what he found was, indeed, quite telling. In short, none of the nomadic groups that he studied even had much of a concept of “education.” “Learning” exists across all cultures—but in nomadic groups, it happens through the processes that look a lot more like play than like school. And there are no state-mandated curricula—each day seems to have something of a new and spontaneous agenda.
If you think about the many ways that this kind of learning deviates from modern public education in the industrialized world, the implications are mind-boggling.
6 Ways That Parents Can Help to Cultivate an Evolutionarily Natural Education for Their Kids
Unless you feel like quitting your job and moving your family to a remote part of the world in an effort to try to join some nomadic group (perhaps unsuccessfully), then you might want to pay attention to a recent (2025) article (first-authored by Kathryne Gruskin) that came out of my research team’s work.
This article, titled “Stakeholders’ Roles in Evolutionizing Education,” is based on an understanding that modern public education is, in so many ways, evolutionarily mismatched from ancestral learning and educational processes. We developed a toolkit with specific suggestions for three classes of stakeholders in modern public education: teachers, administrators, and parents.
Based on the research that exists on this topic, here are the six suggestions that we have for parents to help their children experience a relatively evolutionarily natural form of education (even if they go to a typical public school like I did).
- Encourage technological boundaries at home (e.g., limiting screen time and replacing screen-based activities with hands-on activities).
- Stay involved with your child’s holistic school experience (academics, play, and social-emotional learning).
- Support developmental agency by allowing your child to make choices related to required academic (e.g., homework scheduling) and nonacademic activities (e.g., creative hobbies) within practical parameters.
- Provide options for involving children in important life skills such as cooking and cleaning to develop general self-efficacy.
- Allow your child to explore their interests, physical environments, and social environments.
- Provide reasonable parameters regarding unstructured play for safety-related purposes.*
These suggestions all bear on helping your kid to experience childhood in a way that better matches the kinds of experiences that children would likely have experienced under the ancestral conditions that surrounded the bulk of human evolutionary history.
(For a deep dive into how these suggestions bear on our evolutionary history, please check out our article here or check out Kathryne Gruskin’s Substack post on it.)
Bottom Line
Once we come to understand the profound implications associated with an evolutionary approach to human psychology, we can start to see so many ways that the modern world deviates from the ancestral conditions that surrounded human evolutionary history for the lion’s share of our existence.
As Kathryne Gruskin has pointed out (Gruskin et al., 2025), modern public education is mismatched from ancestral forms of learning in a host of different ways. The stress and difficulty that so many children experience in the public schools may well follow from this enormous mismatch.
The good news is that modern evolutionary behavioral science can help shed light on this issue, leading to clear implications for action (such as those suggested here and in the academic article that this piece is based on).
Want to work to help improve public education? Then take a good look at the work on the evolution/education interface. Only in doing so can we begin to understand how humans evolved to learn in the first place.
* These points come Appendix A of Gruskin et al. (2025).
Note: Kathryne Gruskin’s presentation on this work at the 2025 meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary Psychology Society in Atlantic City won an award for the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society Best Presentation
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