Something big is just arrived at FanDuel Casino. Explore how you can level up your playing experience. Literally, a world of fun awaits. Download FanDuel Casino.
Please play responsible for 19 plus and physical locator in Ontario. Get on to our gambling problem, call 1-6-6-5-3-1, visit Connects Ontario.ca. It's springtime, which means that Princeton University Press is having its annual 50% off spring sale. From May 4th through June 9th, you can get 50% off nearly every single print, e-book, and audio book from Princeton University Press.
Just go to press.prinston.edu to get 50% off incredible books like Disneyland and the Rise of Automation. And beyond belief, how evidence shows what really works. There's so many fantastic books you can get an incredible deal on. Go to press.prinston.edu and use the code spring50.
That's sp-r-i-n-g-50 at press.prinston.edu. This day will only last for a month. So go and get some books. Welcome to the new books network.
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the new books network. My name is Kai Wadman. I'm here today with Anlene Nadou to talk about her new book, Evolutionary Theory and Education.
Welcome to the new books network, Ali. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. The book is on the influence of evolutionary thinking on educational theory and philosophy.
And I wanted to begin by asking you why did you write this book? How come that you were interested in the intersection of evolutionary theory and educational theory? So I wrote this book in the end because a book like this didn't exist. And I felt quite strongly that it would be useful for someone who's interested in understanding those influences to have just have some of these ideas collected in one place, because there has been some research here and there, a kind of speaks to that topic, but not really something one book that you can hold in your hands.
So that's why in the end, I decided to consolidate these over 10 years of research that I've done on the topic. So I started, yeah, these actually over 10 years ago that I started when I was doing my masters at the University of Basel and I first came across this theoretical, I don't really want to call it school, because it wasn't actually that big. But this group of educational thinkers who called themselves evolutionary educators, and I came across them and I'd never heard of them before. And I got really fascinated with their way of arguing, their way of talking about education.
And really, since then, it hasn't, I've just been, since then, I've been interested in understanding what that connection could be between education and evolution, because it seems so, the two seem so far apart and on the first thought you'd think they have nothing in common, and then the more I kept digging, the more connections I kept finding, and that's sort of what the book is in Yenda, an attempt at bringing together all these different little projects that I've done on this topic. Yeah. Yeah, I want to ask you about the connection, because one might think, I read the book, and it's really fascinating, and now I, as good pragmatist, I was convinced from the start that this is a very important topic, but maybe people might think that, okay, education is something I do intentionally, I want to educate somebody, whereas evolution is something that just happens, whether or not somebody influences it. So why should we think about the connection between evolution and education?
Well, I don't know if we should, really, I mean, that's kind of, that's an important part of the book that I actually can't, or I'm not providing any answer to that question, whether we should or we shouldn't further go into that connection, or whether it is actually useful for us to use evolutionary theory to think about education. What I can say is that it's been done a lot, and that is kind of the reason why I think it's important to look into it, because you mentioned the pragmatist in the book, I'm talking about many different thinkers, from different eras, different traditions of thought, different places in the world, different languages, and they've all kind of found something interesting in different evolutionary paradigms when they came up with their own concepts of education. And those ideas are still grounding quite a lot of, what we might call a modern theory of education, and still today these ideas reverberate in ongoing discourses. And so again, that's why, that's the reason for me to look at these connections, because they are already there.
And so that's almost like a separate question to whether we think they are worthwhile, or we should explore them further. That's another discussion that I'm not going into that much in the book, but it's why the book will hopefully help people to maybe make up their own minds a little bit about this, because as I also write in the book, there's quite a lot of, sometimes call it general suspicion towards evolutionary thinking in the social sciences, which is well-founded in history. There have obviously been extremely problematic manifestations of evolutionary thinking in the context of social theory, for example. But what I'm saying is that we shouldn't just, based on that history, just have an aversion against those ideas.
I think if we are to reject them, if we are to reject such a perspective in education, for example, we should do it based on maybe more nuanced arguments. So there's the problematic history, historic precedent, yes. But then also, what is it about evolutionary theorizing in education that we like or not like? So that's an ongoing discourse.
The book does not provide an answer to this, but hopefully gives some insight that can help people maybe be a bit more open-minded in the way they explore, whether they like those ideas or not. Maybe you can offer a little bit of an insight into this problematic history, because maybe some people might think, okay, social Darwinism, we cannot go back into this direction. And as you said, you don't, as I write the book, a specific own account of educational evolutionary education forward, or something, the attempt of the book is more to describe and to systematize position theories, approaches, traditions that used evolutionary thinking in their own ways of theorizing education. But maybe we can give a little bit of this problematic background before we go into the theories that you examine in more detail in the book.
Yeah, so you mentioned social Darwinism. I think that's a very big one. So there are some sort of problematic, I don't even know whether that's a good label for them, but yeah, I guess we can call them problematic manifestations of this theory in the context of eugenics, eugenics ideology, even racist ideologies in the German context with national socialism. There's a bit of a discussion as to how the influence might have been on the thinking around that time.
I don't really want to speak too much about that, because I'm not an expert by any means. When it comes to those influences and in the book, I only touch on them briefly. That doesn't mean I don't think they're relevant, but I suppose the argument of the book is something like, I want to provide, obviously, other side of it to say, we can acknowledge there is this problematic historic precedent, but what else is there about this form of theorizing more on a systematic level that is worthy of discussion? So what does it actually mean to think of something as evolving?
What does it actually mean to think of education in evolutionary terms? And is there something desirable, such undesirable inherent to that way of theorizing education? That's more what I want to get at with the book rather than history. I'm not historian of education.
I'm listing some of those studies that have been conducted recently. So there's definitely scholarship on that. But yeah, I think I'm not the right person to talk about that in more depth. When it comes to the more, like the argumentative patterns, the logic of speaking in evolutionary terms, the terminology, I think there are certain things that emerge as potentially problematic and one that I want to emphasize maybe is this kind of idea that there's some sort of epistemic superiority to an evolutionary perspective.
That's kind of an idea that I've encountered over and over again, even from those evolutionary educators in the German context around the 2000s that I mentioned at the start. This idea that, okay, evolution is science. These ideas are scientifically founded. There's some sort of truth to them, and that truth applies to education.
And so we can say something sort of true and objectively valuable about education. Using evolutionary terms. And that I think is a big mistake in the end. And that's also what the book tries to show, or at least that was my attempt to show it, that there isn't even such thing as the theory of evolution in the sciences, let alone in the way it is applied to the social sciences and education.
And so that entire idea that evolutionary theory under guards education in a way that allows us to make some sort of superior statements about what education should be or ought to be, I think that's much guided. Yeah. It sounds a bit like a new attempt to find a final vocabulary. Finally, we know something scientific in education and that's evolution.
But as you show in your book, I mean, as you just said, even within biology, there is a big discussion of what kind of evolutionary theory actually is the right theory or the one with the most explanatory value. So even that is in discussion. Yes. The core of the book.
Oh, sorry. And it's just what he said is very true. And this is echoed in some of the literature, this idea that evolutionary theory is sort of the last grand narrative. It is our last attempt at finally unifying the sciences, explaining everything, using one neat little principle.
And that is extremely tempting. I find the evolutionary principle has such a beauty in it in a way because it is so intuitive, it is so far reaching. Once you see it, you can see it everywhere. You actually can go through life and think of everything as evolving.
And it is really tempting to do that. And I find that extremely interesting. And I find it very interesting what that does to a theory as it is emerging. So I find this just such an interesting starting point for any evolutionary education of theory that it begins with this.
So yeah, neat principle that can explain absolutely everything. And I mean Darwin, he wrote himself that there's this grandeur to this way of seeing life. And I think that is true. It is, you know, no wonder there were all these spiritualist connections, people connecting it with religion because it has almost this religious dimension.
So all of that fascinates me. Sorry, I interrupted you, but just because you said that one thing, it might have been this. Yeah, no. And also the beauty of it is also shown on the cover by a, with an illustration of Hekul.
Yes. And also there that this year, beauty of science. I love the cover. So if people listen to it, they should at least Google the book for having to look at the cover.
Yes. And also of course have a look into the book, but it's just to lure people in. The core of the book is I think are four chapters on one concept each. So it's adaptation, selection, inheritance and progress.
And I thought maybe we can tackle these concepts one after the other. So maybe we can start with education as adaptation. What is the connection between adaptation and evolutionary theory and then, again, education? Yeah.
So the concept of adaptation is possibly, yeah, I think it's really one of the most interesting ones, which is probably why I started with it in the book. And it's interesting because it can mean a lot of different things. It has in fact meant a lot of different things in particular in the context of educational theory. And so there's a very basic connection between this idea of adaptation and education.
If you think about it, both of them are about organism, individual, whatever we want to call it in their environment and the way that relationship is negotiated. So at the very heart, I think there is quite a strong connection between this concept of adaptation and educational thinking. So it is to me not at all surprising that a lot of thinkers have used this idea to define the educational relationship, to define how an individual exists in the world and develops alongside the environment that they inhabit. And so in the book, I'm in this chapter, I'm talking about three thinkers in particular.
So they are all quite different from each other, which is why I chose that. These are by no means the only educational thinkers who wrote about adaptation or have used this concept. These three, they kind of lend themselves to comparison and to draw out all these different facets to the concept. The chapter starts with Herbert Spencer.
He's probably the least well-known of three, but definitely the least well-known of three in an educational context. People don't read Spencer at all today, I would say, in education. He's really a forgotten figure. He's also labeled that in the literature.
But in his own time, he was a very, very big thinker. He wrote a best-selling book about education that was used as a textbook in various contexts. He wrote lots of articles in teacher journals and so on. So he really wrote a lot about education, and he was read by many people.
So at the time, he's thinking was definitely influential. He has a very particular idea of adaptation as really a one-way relationship. I'm just saying individual. I could say organism.
I could say entity. But I'm just using this term individual in that. So I'm thinking, let's just think about people. He applies the same principle to every living being.
But I'm going to use this sort of human language. In his view, the individual exists in an environment and adapts to this environment. So this is very much one-way street. I try as an individual, I just try to survive in this environment and the environment exerts certain pressures.
So I'm just adapting to whatever comes my way. That's his view of adaptation. He also uses this to think of education. So what's the purpose of education?
The purpose of education is adaptation in his meaning of the word. The purpose of education is to enable people to adapt as well as possible to the circumstances that they're in. And he is not at all, for example, interested in any kind of transformative relationship or mutual relationship with individuals, not an active agent in the sense that they would shape their environment in any way. That's more what Piaget and Tiwi think.
So the shift to Piaget is very strong. So we have the totally different idea of adaptation. He has these quite well-known terms of assimilation and accommodation. Everyone who's encountered Piaget ever knows about these two terms.
They're extremely central to his theory of cognitive development. So for Piaget, the adaptive process is very much in the mind. It's all about changing the way we think about the world, how we use our environment to do things. But it's different from Spencer in that sense that it's not just the past is fitting into what's there, but also instead of using what's there for our own benefit.
So the individual tries to understand the world, tries to be an agent in the world, and to that end, you know, adapts their own way of thinking to what they encounter, but also kind of uses what they encounter in a way that helps them to achieve certain ends. So their adaptation is a much more active thing. It isn't just a fitting into it. It is more and more active.
And that trend continues with Dewey. So John Dewey is one of the most popular educational thinkers still. So he's still read extremely widely, you know, just to contrast it with Spencer. And he had, well, how does he say it?
He was extremely critical of Spencer. To a point, I mean, I found that almost comedic some of these writings, some of these passages where Dewey really tears Spencer to absolute shreds over Spencer's mistakes that he makes in his view in the way he thinks about evolution. And yeah, he's just not a fan. And that comes through.
And so Dewey's idea of adaptation is really completely opposed to Spencer's. So in Dewey adaptation is very much an adaptation to the environment, but also all of the environment. So here we have this very active going into the world, changing things in order to achieve goals that I either were given to me or I created myself. So this is a very kind of simultaneous being in the world, altering the world, being altered by the world.
This isn't really a, you know, cause and effect type thing. This is all kind of happening at the same time. So the adaptive relationship with Dewey is extremely complex and, and it's, and a mutual and kind of leads to what he calls growth, but the mutual growth of the individual and their surroundings. So they kind of being transformed as part of the same process.
And that's how he understands adaptation as a process of growth. And the way evolutionary thinking, for example, plays a role here is in this notion of the disruption of continuity. That's what Dewey talks about. So we want to achieve something.
We want to do something and we can't. We fail. Maybe we don't know enough. Maybe we have some misconceptions.
But that's this moment of discontinuity and experience. Some people have talked about this in terms of negativity. There's a moment of a break in experience and the individuals kind of forced to change the way they think so that they can actually achieve their ends in view. And that's the moment where they're forced to re-adapt.
So I feel like we can see here that this, this idea of adaptation really underpins his concept of growth because it's, it's this idea of like being not being well adapted to the environment and having to re-adapt and that effort is what leads to growth. And it's, and it's, it's not growth towards predefined way of existing, but it's always in relationship to what actually occurs. And it's always contingent on this evolving relationship between the individual and the environment. So this isn't like, the gradual attainment of a specific end point or the approach of some kind of final goal.
Growth is very much, we don't know the direction of it. And that's the same with the evolutionary movement. Evolution is a process that through adaptation there's change, but there isn't any kind of objective sort of progress or, or, or yeah, a goal that we're going towards. And that's, I think very, very deeply embodied in, in Dewey's concept of growth.
At least that's how I come to read Dewey. To me, in my understanding of Dewey, evolutionary theory matters a great deal. Yeah. And I think that's sort of what this chapter is about, in that it shows this, these different ways in which adaptation can be, can and has been understood and then sort of shows Dewey's take in particular, because that's kind of the basis for a lot of the continuing discussion in the book.
Yeah. And I also, as I read it, the step from Piaget to Dewey in adaptation, I missed the part of the word earlier. Also is that Dewey highlights more, as I understood, maybe I read it wrong. First the social aspect and it's not like only the adaptation of the individual to its environment, but it's also a social dimension.
And then also maybe we could say embodied. So when you talk about habits, for example, it's not maybe as in Piaget a little bit as it was only a process in your mind, but it's also an active embodied process. Is that correct? Yes.
Yes. That's a very important point. Thank you for highlighting that. Yes.
So definitely the difference between Piaget and Dewey is much smaller, perhaps, than between the two of them and Spencer, there's a big jump. And then there's a lot of parallels between the latter two. But as you said, exactly, Piaget is interested in cognitive change. So this is really a theory about how thinking evolves, how knowledge evolves, how we come to know things in interaction with the environment.
With his theory, he opposes this view that the environment just imprints on us in a way. He just highlights that the whole cognitive process is much more like an evolutionary relationship, not just an imprinting of the environment into the self, which it is with Spencer. And then with Dewey, he uses that same kind of principle of the adaptation to an adaptation off, but as you've highlighted correctly, for him it's not just about cognitive development of an individual. This is very much about a full person in the world and how they act.
It's about institution. It's about groups of people. It's about culture. It's about much more than simply how we think of know things.
And for him, this actual transformation of the environment plays a very big role. So again, it isn't just about our understanding of the world, but actually us forming our environment in the way that we want to in order to achieve certain goals that we have. So very concrete, this means institutions, for example, habits of interacting. It is just much, much broader.
And it is, as you've also said, really embedded in social relationships. So it's not just an individual kind of fending for him or herself, but it's what kind of... Dewey just emphasizes how we're dependent on each other and how our ways of doing things are already always shaped by the social context that we're in. In ways that he is much more abstract.
He just thinks about the cognitive processes occurring in the individual, and he doesn't, and some people criticizes about him. He doesn't really think about particular history contexts, for example, in which these processes might occur. But it's really about the mechanisms going on. And for Dewey, it is much more about the actual problems also that face societies and how individuals' development features in the development of societies with large.
So yeah, I'm glad you said that. That's a very important point. We then say for Dewey that not only individuals are living organisms in the process of evolution, but for example, because I mentioned institutions, could we say that, for example, institution of school or our ideals of education and educational institutions or the aim of education, also them are part of the evolutionary process? Yes, absolutely.
And this is where he's very pragmatist, right? He has this very pragmatist ethics, a pragmatist epistemology that he thinks there isn't really... He's not interested in this notion of an objective truth. It is all about what works right now, what is useful and what is true in this particular context.
He's not interested in an objective truth and the same with ethics. He thinks the way we interact, they are evolving, our ideas about what is good and what is bad are changing. And the way they're changing is not pre-directed. There isn't some sort of trajectory towards an improved state.
This is all just a relative to what's actually happening. And that's a very, yeah, that's a very pragmatist way of thinking that is in the end underpinned by an evolutionary worldview. That's at least how I see it. Some people agree with that view.
So yes, absolutely, institutions are evolving ideas, habits, individual habits, social habits. They can all be thought of as evolving in this sense, in the TU-E-N perspective. Which has consequences as I talk about in the progress chapter. It has consequences for how we think of change.
Should we maybe then jump to that? Although it's not the chronological as it is in the book. Maybe now that you speak of progress. I mean the classical idea of education is from the Enlightenment on, is that education is kind of the fulfillment of the human potential.
And the gradually improvement of humanity or the individual or mainly mostly both. So education is about the perfection of the individual and the perfection of humanity as well. Whereas in evolutionary theory, I feel like this idea becomes slightly problematic because then there is no, as you said, there is no final goal. Also not a clear direction to which we can point and say this is the way to perfection.
Okay, that was not a question. No, but it's very general. What we usually think about when we think about education and maybe what I try to make evolutionary theory sound a bit provocative here. That's great.
It's also extremely important because some people, what D.E.E. has definitely been criticized and especially his notion of growth has been criticized to be relativistic. Like, oh, we'll growth in any direction. Is there no way of telling what is a desirable direction for growth or education and what isn't?
And that's very important to say that clearly there is. And D.E.E.E. has all these safeguards built into his theory. First and foremost, I think his notion of democracy, the democratic ideal gives really strong guardrails to what sort of developments can be considered growth.
So not every development or not everything we do is conducive to growth. Growth is not predefined trajectory, but it is also not just, you know, less affair. Everyone just does whatever the hell they want. This is all very embedded in the democratic ideal, in the social context.
So we, he talks a lot about dependency. We actually need each other. So what we want is not just an individual desire on a whim. Oh, I want this.
I'm going to go out and I'm going to do this and I don't care what anyone else thinks. As humans, we care hugely about what other people think. We are actually dependent on being part of institutions, being included in culture, being part of conversations. So all of these things ensure that what can be considered as growth, meaning what can help us in embedding us more and more with the people and the world around us.
All these things, they are not relative. And so there is definitely still this idea of education as the fulfillment of personal potential. Like you said, you know, that's very essential part of education. And for Dewey, that still absolutely counts.
It's just that the path towards perfection, what perfection just means something totally different for Dewey. Now, Cosaito has three beautiful quote where she says, for Dewey, perfection is perfecting. So growth is an unending process. It is not about getting to a specific way of being and then you're done.
No, this is not his idea of education. This is an ongoing personal growth in relation to the world you're in. So you're constantly growing. As soon as you stop, it's almost like again, it's like death.
In evolution, if you stop adapting, if you stop changing, in many cases, it means death. Not in every case, some organisms have basically not changed since the dinosaurs. But in most cases, if you want to stay alive in nature, you have to keep changing in relation to your environment or affect the environment in ways that are conducive to your way of being in them. And that applies to how do we think of education.
Education is not a process that ends at a specific point or is a process that is totally directed from the outside. It is really about the person's continuous dynamic being in the world and the democratic ideal, which he ties to this whole evolutionary thinking, gives kind of a guardrail to that process. So not every idea, everything is going to lead to growth. So anything we do that arrests are for the potential for growth is not desirable.
So there are definitely ways of telling what is a valuable development and what isn't. So he's not a relativist. I guess the very short way of saying this, which is important because it is very tempting to think of him as a relativist, especially if we make this connection to evolution and think, oh, you know, evolution, we can go any which way. But the way he integrates evolutionary thinking in his philosophy has guardrails against this kind of relativism.
A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer.
That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us. Learn how at ontario.ca.ca.ca. Pay for by the government of Ontario.
On another, maybe also not so widely read, author you draw on in the progress chapter is left with Gotski. Again, psychologists as P.I.G. but I think if I'm not wrong, they lived at the same time and were kind of in one way or the other opposing positions on cognitive development and language. And, okay, again, I'm just rambling and not put a question here.
I want you to talk about Vigotski because I find him also very interesting. Yes, me too. I like Vigotski a lot. And I like him also because he helps me understand something about Dewey that I didn't understand before.
So the way Vigotski uses evolutionary thinking is quite different. So he makes, so as I said, for Dewey, growth is really central. He thinks of the way we develop as a very gradual process. We interact with the environment, we grow the simultaneous development.
This is all very cumulative. The next thing builds on the thing before. Everything's embodied in everything. This is organic.
I think organic is actually a good word to describe. This is all very organic process for Dewey. But Vigotski actually argues that in his notion of evolution, not every process of development is like that. He thinks that on top of these cumulative processes of growth, occasionally there are leaps.
So he talks about leaps onto a new plane. He makes this distinction between quantitative change, which would apply to Dewey's idea of growth. There's quantitative change, but things, you know, it... New developments embody the older versions of themselves.
But for Vigotski, there is also qualitative leaps. So sometimes quantitative changes give rise or provide opportunities for us to fundamentally change how we do things. So rather than us kind of gradually shifting the way we do things, we sometimes just totally change. And from then on, we see the world in a different way.
We have maybe integrated a tool in the way we act that fundamentally changes our relationship with the world. And that's more a Marxist, Arvinist idea of evolution that undergirds his thinking. But it's extremely interesting to me to think about that difference in how we think about change in and through education. So I mentioned earlier that you could critique Dewey's idea of growth as being maybe too gradual.
Well, if everything is kind of slow and building on each other and cumulative, then is there never any radical change? What about moments when we want to radically depart from one way of doing things and do things in a totally different way? That's all really difficult in Dewey's thinking. He thinks of that as undesirable, essentially.
He writes quite extensively about, you know, maybe it would be great to just simply stop doing things one way and start doing them in another way. But it doesn't work because our habits and the social habits were in and the institutions were in. They have not had the opportunity to grow alongside, evolve alongside this idea. And so it will not stick.
He just doesn't up-believe in this kind of change. For Dewey's change is gradual and hence also slow. And that comes out as well in Jane Adams, who's a pragmatist thinker that I write about in the book and her idea of natural progress. She's saying there is no point in just one thing, suddenly changing the fundamental way.
Everything has to change kind of at the same time, but slowly. In Vygotsky, it's not like that. Before Vygotsky, he's interested in the revolution. Again, the link to the Marxist Darwinist view.
Vygotsky is very interested in how can these moments arise, in which we just stop doing one thing and we start doing another thing because we've maybe understood something or we've developed something. There's some sort of innovation and it allows just fast changes in the way we do things. And especially today, you know, if we think about the world today and all the, you know, think about the climate disaster, which I write about a little bit in the book, obviously we want, ideally we want to, things to change really quickly. We want individual people's habits to change yesterday, right?
The latest today. And so it's not very desirable for us to think, oh, this is all going to take ages. This is all going to have to evolve alongside schools and alongside institutions in society and alongside the law and our moral principles. We don't have the time to think of change that way.
And so if we want to conceptualize changes quick, then someone like Vygotsky is just much more appealing. On the other hand, Dewey would say, well, these quick changes, you know, they can occur, but they're not lasting and they're not democratically evolved. They are not in the end. They're not integrated in how people really think and how people act.
So they won't, they won't stay. They won't stick. So he just doesn't believe in it. He's not that he wouldn't want quick change.
I mean, he's, he also experienced in the various contexts in which he worked and traveled and lived in. He experienced a lot of issues in society and so on that he would have wished that there was a quick way of changing things. But he just thought there wasn't, not that he didn't want it. And so I think that's what I find extremely interesting about Vygotsky in how he's highlighted this for me about Dewey.
In a way that just reading Dewey wasn't so clear to me, but it's really the contrast between the two and the kind of shared references to evolutionary thinking was very enlightening for me. And I found that interesting. And I think because of that, I also don't read Vygotsky just, I quote unquote, just a psychologist or a developmental person. I think he really has quite a complex philosophy of education to offer, which we're just now starting to uncover because he's only so recently been translated into English.
So all his works have not been accessible to us. So if anyone's interested in doing so interesting philosophy of every research, I think I think there's lots to discover in Vygotsky. How does Vygotsky think of these quick revolutionary changes? I mean, you mentioned the climate crisis and maybe people are interested.
Okay. So what's like, how can these quick changes come? Is it that we can provoke them in education or do they come naturally? Do they come with experiences with certain kinds of language use or how does Vygotsky think about it?
And that's a really good question. I think he actually, well, especially for education folks, this idea of the zone of proximate development is going to be extremely familiar, especially people who have gone through teacher training. So I also work in teacher training and this idea of the zone of proximate development is so popular in teaching today. Teachers are being said, oh, you've got to create the zone for your students so that they can jump to this next developmental leave and all that.
So that's one example where we can see how Vygotsky actually thinks that this happens. So Vygotsky thinks that there is sort of things we can do on our own. And then there are things we can do with the help of others. And that thing we can't do on our own yet, but can do with help of others.
That's our zone, sort of the upcoming next development that we're able to make. And it's a task for teacher to recognize those and to help us make that leap. And so that's where we have this, you know, sort of learning. He uses two different concepts for that.
He's learning and development. So we learn, we learn, that's probably to think of as the quantitative change in our relationship with the environment. And then we have an opportunity to develop. And that's the qualitative, the leap to a new way of relating to our environment.
And that's where he thinks educational action can come in, you know, by providing certain tools coming in with certain ideas. So the teacher has always an opportunity to give us new things to work with, new things to relate to our surroundings. And now this I'm just making up, but we think about this, probably with the climate crisis and, you know, sustainability, education and all that, which is hugely important and hugely big at the moment. I think Vygotski lends himself to provide quite interesting ideas for that to think, well, what are the ideas then that we think are valuable to, and what are the tools that we want people to integrate in their way of being in the world that can actually change how they, for example, consume, or, you know, how they travel or whatever.
Yeah, so he doesn't, he doesn't exactly give as concrete advice as you were maybe wanting there. But I think his way of thinking about development and the education's influence on development is quite interesting if we want to think about the potential of education to be part of these big, bigger changes in, in people's ways of doing things. That's also interesting because in this political discussion, there's a lot of blaming, okay, others are responsible for this environmental crisis and it's not us, we cannot do anything. And actually, it's quite interesting that you now point out that in this idea of zone approximate development, the idea of I cannot do it alone, but together with others.
So maybe we need to, it's just while thinking now, and sorry for departing from the book, but we will come back to it quickly, but maybe we just need to enlarge the group. Like we need to find the zone of approximate development for humanity or something. Okay, that was just while thinking. Yeah.
Okay, maybe we should, so this was kind of the connection between evolutionary theory and progress. And I also like, yeah, you highlighted with with Vigotski that within different approaches in educational theory, one could see progress more more gradually or more radically, more progressivist or revolutionary if you want. And it's also the last sub-section is on evolution and revolution in education. But we hadn't touched upon the topics of selection and inheritance.
Should we maybe quickly also talk about them? So I think selection is more familiar with people or people would quickly think of selection when they think about evolution. So the principle of selection, but together with education apart from, okay, people need grades in school in order to select further possibilities. What is the connection between education and selection as you see it?
Yeah, so like you say, it's a term we encounter in education in, for example, the grading or we also things like having to select people to study particular subjects, you know, like in medical profession and things like that. So we have different forms and tools of selection in educational practice embedded. But the chapter, and this is possibly the most of historically oriented chapter of the other ones in the book, this is really about trying to understand how a very particular idea of selection in evolution has shaped how we think of education and then maybe trying to trace some of those remnants and how they still show up in today's discourse. So again, Spencer is someone in his evolutionary theory of education selection plays a very big role.
He thinks, so essentially Spencer thinks that in the end, the influence that education has on the gradual progression of society towards perfect state is actually quite minimal. So education is not the means by which people change in particular ways. It's really for him all about biology. So in the end, what needs to be improved is not individual human beings in the way they act or think or what they believe, but it's really the biology has human nature that needs to be improved.
And that happens through a process of gradual selection of the week. So obviously, that's what the whole social Darwinist thinking comes in. Spencer is rightly known often as the father of social Darwinism. He really took evolutionary theory and applied, especially the study of competition and selection to human societies and derived whole ethics from that.
And also for his concept of education, it is very influential because in the end, Spencer thinks all that education can do is actually allow that process of selection to happen. So a lot of it has to do with moral education, actually teaching people that completion is a good thing, teaching people that ungeusimpathy isn't something desirable, but we should actually let people be free to some extent to just compete and but not help them or not support them too much. So he's not at all interested in an equal society, much the opposite. He's very much interested in a highly unequal stratified society in which the week can gradually go away and then through procreation across the generations, human nature will improve.
That's his idea. And so education has actually played a very active part in that process. It's all about genes and people. Yeah, people's biology is improving.
That seems very extreme, obviously from today's point of view, but it was also very influential. Ellen Kay, someone who was very big fan of Spencer, Ellen Kay is a quite well-known figure, especially in the German, Kefon Peigagugig, or progressive education movement. She very much agreed with Spencer's idea that ultimately human nature has to be improved and our biology, our essence is just effective. And as long as that's the case, education can't really do much.
We can't actually improve people as long as our nature is not improved. And so she also places high emphasis on this idea of selection. The chapter is not only historic because we actually see a lot of this still around today, especially in the neoliberal discourse. This idea of competition is very popular, the idea that we all just kind of fend for ourselves, try to come out on top in terms of money and influence and also this idea that people who are less fortunate that it's to some degree their own doing, and that it's okay to have a society in which a few people have a lot of success and many don't.
So all of this I'm discussing in the chapter, basically, to say these ideas about competition being a good thing, selection being a good thing, and something that education should support rather than alleviate. Those are still ideas very much around today in the neoliberal education discourse. So that's a very rough overview of this chapter. That's right.
I was not a good timekeeper. We're running out of time, so we will leave the last chapter open for you listeners to actually read on inheritance, which is also very interesting and maybe almost a mirror chapter to the selection one. Final question, Aline, what are you working on right now? Are there any follow-up projects from this book?
So, not really. I mean, for now, I consider this sort of wrapped up with this topic. That doesn't mean I'm not, you know, that I don't continue being very interested in it. So I leave it open that I could do more on this later on, but I'm starting something kind of new soon on this topic of teaching and time.
So how does our idea of time shape the way we teach, the way we interact to students as teachers? And of course, there is a connection there because that project is also very much about what is this process? How do we understand the educational process and how do our ideas of change and how it occurs shape educational action? So there are definitely, there's a link there, but in the form that this book is done, I have nothing further planned at the moment, but I'm very excited to have this sort of new facet of the very general topic.
Okay, thank you very much. And maybe we can have another discussion on education and time in a few years. That's great. Thanks so much for having me.