'Innate teaching skills' component of human nature

A new study has revealed that innate teaching skills are an unknown part of human nature.

Lead researcher and Washington State University anthropologist Barry Hewlett has found that teaching in formal education is a way different than the way it used to prevail in small-scale groups that he had worked with.

However, cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists suggested that this teaching is universal. Hewlett was particularly intrigued by the thinking of cognitive psychologists like Gyorgy Gergely of Central European University.

Gergely described an innate form of teaching called "natural pedagogy" in which a teacher directly demonstrates skills by, say, pointing, gazing or talking to a child. The learners in turn used the cues to imitate and learn about novel objects.

Hewlett opined that it's important to remember that, cognitively and teaching occurs both in the teacher as well as in the child.

The research showed that the Aka are among the last of the world's hunter-gatherers, but their way of life accounts for 99 percent of human history.

The study is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.