The Premises of Evolutionary Educational Psychology
The premises state there are
- (a) aspects of mind and brain that have evolved to draw the individuals’ attention to and facilitate the processing of social (folk psychology), biological (folk biology), physical (folk physics) information patterns that facilitated survival or reproductive outcomes during human evolution (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994; Geary, 2005; Gelman, 1990; Pinker, 1997; Shepard, 1994; Simon, 1956);
- (b) although plastic to some degree, these primary abilities are inherently constrained to the extent associated information patterns tended to be consistent across generations and within lifetimes (e.g., Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Geary & Huffman, 2002);
- (c) other aspects of mind and brain evolved to enable the mental generation of potential future social, ecological, or climatic conditions and enable rehearsal of behaviors to cope with variation in these conditions, and are now known as general fluid intelligence, or gF (including skill at everyday reasoning/problem solving; Chiappe & MacDonald, 2005; Geary, 2005; Mithen, 1996); and
- (d) children are inherently motivated to learn in folk domains, with the associated attentional and behavioral biases resulting in experiences that automatically and implicitly flesh out and adapt these systems to local conditions (Gelman, 1990; Gelman & Williams, 1998; Gelman, 2003).
Read more about this topic: Evolutionary Educational Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words premises, evolutionary, educational and/or psychology:
“The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose conclusion once a thousand years have passed no one has dared to draw as yet.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
—Stanley Weiser, U.S. screenwriter, and Oliver Stone. Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)
“Your organization is not a praying institution. It’s a fighting institution. It’s an educational institution right along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)