Why Education Is Important

Find a Child Therapist

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 that such an outcome should be more common than not (see Gruskin et al,. 2025; Bjorklund & Osei, in press).

Why Taking an Evolutionary Perspective to Education Matters

My running partner paused and thought about it. He, like most educated Americans, hadn't thought about the evolutionary perspective applied to schooling prior to that moment. And it seemed to make sense to him.

In much of the recent work conducted by my lab, the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab, largely led by senior lab member, behavioral science researcher and public elementary school teacher, Kathryne Gruskin, we have focused on better understanding the nature of mismatch in modern public education. With each new study, we are finding all kinds of outcomes that truly give pause when we think about how our school systems are designed relative to how learning took place for kids during the lion's share of human evolutionary history (see Gruskin & Geher, 2018, Gruskin et al., 2025a, Gruskin et al., 2025b, Gruskin et al., 2026).

4 Problems Associated with Evolutionary Mismatch in Schools

If you care about our children, education, and our shared future, I argue that it is strongly in your interest to understand the problems that exist as a result of the large-scale evolutionary mismatch that characterizes public education today. Any time we see such mismatches—especially surrounding our kids—we should probably pause and think about alternatives.

Why Education Is Important

Find a Child Therapist

Here are four specific problems that follow from evolutionary mismatch in modern schools.

Public schools, by and large, famously lack much in the way of free play, which is a pillar of how children in nomadic groups around the world interact with one another on a regular basis (see Gray, 2013). Through free play with other children, kids learn rules of their culture, processes that underlie effective teamwork, appropriate versus inappropriate social behaviors, and more.

In nomadic groups around the world, children generally experience hours of free play with other kids each and every day. In stark contrast, a modern public school might have 20 minutes of recess a day.

2. Homogeneous-Aged Groups Are Not Natural

If you think back to your third-grade class, you'll likely remember being surrounded by about 25 kids, all likely 7-8 years of age—just like you. You probably had a single adult teacher whom you'd never met prior to the start of class. This person would be the leader of all the kids for the full academic year.

In stark contrast, in nomadic groups around the world, kids generally learn from other kids (not from adults), and they interact with kids from a variety of ages. In other words, simply being exposed to a the same group of kids your own age and being directed by a single adult for the better part of a year is highly evolutionarily unnatural.

3. School Can Worsen Social Anxiety

Various researchers from around the industrialized world have suggested that public schools can act as virtual breeding grounds for mental health problems, such as social anxiety (see Jiang et al., 2022; Twenge et al., 2019). As highlighted in the anecdote at the start of this piece, once you look at things from an evolutionary perspective, it becomes clearer as to why modern public schools seem to facilitate social anxiety and related adverse psychological outcomes.

When an organism finds itself in environments that do not match the ancestral conditions that surrounded the evolution of that organism, mismatch exists and adverse consequences often follow. If anything, it would be surprising if social anxiety were not a common outcome associated with modern public schools.

4. Suicidal Ideation Follows the School Year

Perhaps the most disturbing finding that can be well-understood in terms of mismatch in the schools speaks to the fact that among young people, suicidal ideation seems to track the school year. In short, on average, teens and young adults show lower levels of suicidal ideation during school breaks (e.g., summer) relative to times when school is in session. Given how incredibly mismatched modern schools are from ancestral forms of learning that surrounded human evolution, this fact is, unfortunately, not surprising.

When it comes to evolutionary mismatch in the modern human experience, the nature of public education is perhaps the prototype (see Gruskin et al., 2025a). Modern public education is riddled with mismatches—and this fact can go a long way toward explaining such critical issues such as the concerning levels of social anxiety and suicidal ideation among our youth.

If you are in the field of education—or if you simply care about our kids and about our shared future—I suggest that you look to understand the evolutionary perspective as it relates to education. The implications for change to the system are both clear and profound. We dismiss the evolutionary perspective to our own detriment.

Bjorklund, D. F., & Osei, P. C. (in press). Evolutionary Educational Psychology. In G. Geher, A. Gallup, & S. Karthikeyan (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford University Press.

Geher, G., Eisenberg, E., DeMaio, M., Casa, O., Caserta, A. J., Cochran, K., Cohen, L., Dewan, A., Dickinson-Frevola, S., Fenigstein, L., Giboyeaux, C., Goren, M., Jerabek, E., Lieberstein, J., Marr, L., Staccio, B., & Tamayo, N. (2025). The Evolutionary Psychology of Breaking Informal Versus Formal Contracts: Effects of Group Size and Area of Upbringing. Behavioral Sciences, 15(11), 1458. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15111458

Geher, G. & Wedberg, N. (2022). Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to Living a Richer Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gray, P. (2011). Free to Learn. Basic Books.

Gruskin, K., Murray, J. L., Geher, G., McCarthy, M., Gilbert, T., & Perez, S. (2026). Teacher preferences regarding evolutionarily aligned pedagogy and the impact on student outcomes in K-2 education. Evolutionary Studies and Higher Education, 16 (Sp. Iss. 1), 16-45. https://doi.org/10.59077/ULTG4958

Gruskin, K., Caserta, A., Colodny, J., Dickinson-Frevola, S., Eisenberg, E., Geher, G., Griffin, M., McCarthy, A., Santos, S., Thatch, S., & Tamayo, N. (2025). Evolutionary mismatches inherent in elementary education: Identifying the implications for modern schooling practices. Encyclopedia, 5, 105; https://doi.org/10.3390/encyclopedia5030105

Gruskin, K., Griffin, M., Bansal, S., Dickinson-Frevola, S., Dykeman, A., Groce-Volinski, D., Henriquez, K., Kardas, M., McCarthy, A., Shetty, A., Staccio, B., Geher, G., & Eisenberg, E. (2025). Stakeholders’ Roles in Evolutionizing Education: An Evolutionary-Based Toolkit Surrounding Elementary Education. Behavioral Sciences, 15(1), 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15010092

Gruskin, K., & Geher, G. (2018). The Evolved Classroom: Using Evolutionary Theory to Inform Elementary Pedagogy. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 12, 1-13.

Jiang, M.; Gao, K.; Wu, Z.; Guo, P. The influence of academic pressure on adolescents’ problem behavior: Chain mediating effects of self-control, parent–child conflict, and subjective well-being. Front. Psychol. 2022, 13, 954330.

Kim, Y.; Krause, T.M.; Lane, S.D. (2023). Trends and seasonality of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for suicidality among children and adolescents in the US from 2016 to 2021. JAMA Netw. Open, 6, e2324183.

Twenge, J. M., Cooper, A. B., Joiner, T. E., Duffy, M. E., & Binau, S. G. (2019). Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005-2017. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128, 185-199.

© Psychology Today