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The evolutionary perspective suggests that we would be wise to understand ancestral human conditions.

Modern living is significantly mismatched from the ancestral conditions that surrounded our evolution.

Public schools stand as a prototype for how modern conditions don't match ancestral human conditions.

Problems such as high levels of social anxiety and suicidal ideation follow from such large-scale mismatch.

It was a late September afternoon, and I was running with a friend after work. During our conversation, I asked him how his daughter was doing in high school. His response was immediate frustration.

He reported that, in spite of the school district being relatively small, his somewhat introverted daughter was having a hard time socially. Apparently none of her friends from middle school were in any of her classes and she seemed to dread going to school each day.

My response to this was, perhaps not surprisingly, rooted in evolutionary thinking.

"Gosh, that stinks," I said, expressing empathy for this difficult situation. "Personally, I don't blame your daughter at all—I blame the system." He looked at me, encouraging me to elaborate. I went on about how there are so many things about modern public education that are simply mismatched from the ways that our ancestors evolved to experience learning.

To start, being thrown into a group of new strangers each and every year, as is typical in so many American public school systems, is deeply evolutionarily unnatural. Under ancestral conditions, humans did not encounter strangers with nearly the same frequency that we experience now. And guess what? Humans have an entirely different way of interacting with strangers (including appropriate levels of hesitation and skepticism) than we have when interacting with others whom we know well (see Geher et al., 2025).

If you look at what learning looks like in nomadic groups around the world today—as Peter Gray (2011) famously did—you'll find many features of learning that likely matched what ancestral learning was like for children for the bulk of human evolutionary history. This is because all humans were nomads living in small clans comprised of familiar others for nearly all of our existence (see Geher & Wedberg, 2022).

So the fact that my friend's 14-year-old daughter was having social troubles at the start of a public high school in the U.S. should not be surprising. In fact, when you step back and take an evolutionary approach, you might conclude........

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