A Note On How Evolutionary Thinking Captured Education
I went to a book launch of Aline Nardo's book 'Evolutionary Theory and Education' and was struck by how pervasive the notion of progress is in educational thinking. Philosophers at the event didn't really worry too much about that and went hell for leather about refining what progression meant and how to make it happen. It seemed to me that that might be the problem.
Since 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, evolution has provided more than a biological explanation. It has supplied a cultural grammar. Education in particular has absorbed that grammar so deeply that it is difficult to see its contours. We speak of progression, development, growth, improvement, advancement, innovation. A child moves “up” levels. A curriculum “builds” cumulatively. A nation “rises” in global rankings. The future is imagined as higher, more complex, more advanced than the past.
What is striking is that this grammar governs even when positions conflict. John Dewey describes education as growth through adaptive reconstruction of experience. Lev Vygotsky theorises staged development through mediated social interaction. Traditionalists defend the canon as the refined outcome of long cultural selection. Human capital theorists frame schooling as investment in adaptive competitiveness. Even critics of neoliberalism often appeal to fuller development or more authentic flourishing. The debate concerns what kind of progress, not whether progress is the central category.
This pervasive framing has nineteenth century roots. Evolutionary anthropology arranged societies along developmental ladders, from primitive to advanced, from tribal to industrial. Herbert Spencer generalised Darwinian language into a universal theory of social ascent. Progress became not only empirical but normative. Here Alan Macfarlane offers a crucial corrective. In his historical anthropology of England and comparative Eurasian studies, Macfarlane argues that many accounts of modernity wrongly presuppose such a uniform developmental trajectory. The assumption is that societies pass through necessary stages, feudalism to capitalism, status to contract, collectivism to individualism.
Macfarlane challenges this on empirical grounds. England, he contends, did not move neatly from communal medieval structures to modern individualism. Rather, elements of what we call modernity, such as nuclear families, flexible property relations, and significant individual autonomy, were already present centuries earlier. Modernity did not simply emerge as the next rung on a ladder. It crystallised from particular historical constellations.
Macfarlane also emphasises plural pathways. Japanese Tokugawa society, Chinese imperial bureaucracy, and various Southeast Asian formations developed literacy, urbanisation, and market exchange without following Western political trajectories. These were not incomplete versions of a European future. They were internally coherent arrangements. The ladder metaphor obscures this plurality.
In this respect Macfarlane resonates with Max Weber and Ernest Gellner, whose account of rationalisation analyses transformations in authority and calculation without presenting them as biological ascent. Weber’s modernity is ambiguous. It is efficient but disenchanted. It is not an apex but a condition.
Yet despite such alternatives, evolutionary imagery colonised educational thought. Developmental psychology mapped universal stages. Intelligence testing ranked populations. The ascent of man diagram, the stooped primate gradually straightening into modern humanity, entered schoolbooks. Later subtly became superior. Education was aligned with acceleration along this imagined arc.
This is a misreading of biology of course. Evolutionary theory does not posit intrinsic hierarchy. Adaptations are context dependent. There is no cosmic scale on which mammals outrank bacteria. Yet educational discourse moralises the metaphor. Newer pedagogies are superior. Later knowledge displaces earlier forms. Innovation replaces tradition.
Daniel Bell helps clarify the confusion by distinguishing technological substitution from cultural recursion. A car replaces a horse and cart. The newer technology renders the older obsolete. Cultural forms do not behave in this way. Samuel Beckett does not supersede William Shakespeare. Each reframes the other. Cultural history is not eliminative ascent but layered reconfiguration. Education belongs to the cultural domain, yet it is frequently treated as if it followed the technological model.
If we step back genealogically, we see that education has not always been governed by the ideology of progress. Medieval Christian education oriented learners toward salvation and right relation to divine order. Feudal systems aimed at preserving hierarchical stability. Caste structures organised learning around inherited roles. Confucian examination systems sought moral alignment with a cosmic and bureaucratic order that was presumed enduring. These systems were often oppressive (and don't forget many of us are finding the current progression order oppressive too), but they were not justified by forward movement. Their central concern was right placement, fidelity, and continuity.
The present difficulty is that even attempts to imagine alternatives tend to smuggle in progression through the back door. We replace economic growth with personal growth, competitive advancement with deeper development. The axis remains temporal ascent.
What would it mean to think educationally without presupposing development? Anthropologically, one can begin with models that emphasise reproduction rather than progression. Many small scale societies understand education as transmission of cosmology and practice so that the present mirrors the ancestral pattern. The goal is not to surpass the past but to sustain it. Time is cyclical, not linear. The emphasis is on fidelity to origin stories and ritual accuracy. There is change, but not directional improvement. Similarly, structuralist anthropology, associated with figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, analyses cultures as systems of relations rather than as stages in evolution. The concern is synchronic structure, not diachronic ascent. Education within such a frame would concern mastering relational patterns, myths, and classifications, not moving upward.
Philosophically, Aristotelian teleology is often retrospectively read as proto developmentalism. Aristotle is presented as a theorist of potential becoming actual, conveniently aligned with modern growth narratives. Yet Aristotle’s cosmos is not a story of species progressing historically. It is an ordered whole in which beings realise forms appropriate to their nature. Education is habituation into virtue within a stable polis, not acceleration along a historical arc. When his theological commitments are stripped away, and his teleology secularised, he is easily absorbed into developmental psychology. But that move distorts his metaphysical context.
Similarly, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is frequently appropriated as a prophet of inevitable historical progress. His dialectic is presented as a secular theory of development culminating in modern liberal society. Yet Hegel’s system is saturated with theological commitments about Spirit and reconciliation. When these are bracketed, his philosophy becomes a convenient ancestor of evolutionary historicism. The complexity of his metaphysics is flattened into a story of progressive unfolding.
Philosophy of education often participates in this retrospective projection. Historical thinkers are recruited into a narrative of developmental ascent. Aristotle becomes an early growth theorist. Hegel becomes a proto evolutionary historicist. The past is read as a precursor to our present ideology.
To move beyond progression requires conceptual reorientation. One possibility is to think education in terms of alignment rather than advancement. The central question becomes whether a person stands in right relation to practices, truths, and communities, not whether they have moved further along a scale. Another possibility is resonance. Education could be understood as the capacity to enter into meaningful correspondence with texts, traditions, and others. Resonance does not imply surpassing what came before. It implies attunement.
A further possibility is custodianship. Education might concern the responsible holding and interpretation of inherited forms. This does not mean freezing them, but neither does it treat novelty as inherently superior. Finally, one might think in terms of presence rather than futurity. Instead of orienting education primarily toward later states, it could be oriented toward the quality of current engagement, the seriousness with which inquiry is undertaken now.
These sketches are deliberately non developmental. They do not deny that change occurs. They refuse to treat change as ascent. They resist the slide from evolutionary description to moralised progress. The point, as with Friedrich Nietzsche in his genealogy of morality, is not to return to premodern hierarchies. It is to expose how deeply an unexamined inheritance shapes our thinking. The evolutionary metaphor, filtered through nineteenth century sociology and anthropology, continues to govern educational imagination. It equates later with better and innovation with virtue. Once that genealogy is recognised, space opens for educational purposes that are not bound to the ladder of ascent. Growth may occur, but it need not be the master narrative by which education justifies itself.