Theories of Schooling

All humans that grow up attending or adjacent to schools are likely to develop intuitive everyday “theories” about the nature, purpose, function, and potential optimization of schooling within society.

Some humans will go on to advance and refine these everyday ethnotheories through scientific investigation, knowledge synthesis, and/or other disciplinary ways of knowledge building. Thus, there exists across humanity a vast and diverse landscape of such Theories of Schooling, which can, locally and collectively, form a foundation for community-based school improvement processes everywhere.

Understanding Theories of Schooling

Theories of Schooling are phenomena that scientists as well as whole school communities can study with great interest and benefit. Understanding the full diversity of local Theories of Schooling presents a novel interdisciplinary focus for community science projects.

Our proposed Structure of Knowledge for Theories of Schooling (from Eirdosh & Hanisch, in review) suggests that such theories may be structured in terms of a range of sub-domains, specific aspects of schooling on which humans may reason. As well, Theories of Schooling may be informed by a range of super-domains, broader or more distal time and space generalizations about the human condition, including human origins, diversity, and flexibility.

Thus, scientists and school community members, including especially students, can begin to understand the structure and diversity of local theories of schooling as related to scientific perspectives and real world school outcomes.

Evolving Theories of Schooling

The ultimate aim of our community science lab is to engage students and school communities in practical school improvement, informed by scientific and community-based perspectives. In this context, community science projects can be developed to focus on specific super- and sub- domains as part of advancing local schools as field sites for community-based cultural evolution.

When schools begin to sustain systems in which Stakeholder Theories of Schooling are critically reflected against Scientific Theories of Schooling as part of applied community co-design processes of school improvement, we describe this as an instance of community-based cultural evolution.

Learn more about our Theory of School Improvement, or read our preprint chapter describing the latest conceptual advancements within our community science lab model:

A community science model for interdisciplinary evolution education and school improvement

Eirdosh, D., Hanisch, S. (2023). A Community Science Model for Inter-disciplinary Evolution Education and School Improvement. In: du Crest, A., Valković, M., Ariew, A., Desmond, H., Huneman, P., Reydon, T.A.C. (eds) Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines. Synthese Library, vol 478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33358-3_7

A generalized conceptualization of evolutionary processes allows for a view of the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural variation in our everyday lives as elements of diverse evolving systems. Such a view invites questions about how cultural evolutionary processes may favor or hinder the expression of variant thoughts and behaviors, any of which may be more or less valued by any given community. From an educational perspective, this implies an untapped potential for engaging students in understanding the cultural evolutionary dynamics of their everyday lives, schools, and broader communities. As a strategy to engage this potential, the Community Science Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is developing a unique model of Community-Based Cultural Evolution (CBCE) for inter-institutional collaboration at the intersection of evolution education and applied school improvement efforts. Using advances in teaching for conceptual understanding and transfer of learning, the CBCE model aims to empower students to clarify, investigate, and collaboratively influence the cultural evolutionary dynamics of their own school and surrounding communities. The relationship between students’ evolving intuitive theories of school improvement, and the evolving scientific theories of school improvement scientists, provides a framework for understanding the development of student conceptions of cultural (and, perhaps, biological) change more generally. This chapter provides a conceptual foundation for exploring the claim that engaging students in reflecting on the cognitive, behavioral, and cultural evolutionary processes in their everyday lives provides new opportunities for school improvement and interdisciplinary evolution education initiatives. The practical and systemic challenges of this approach are clarified and future directions are outlined.