My goal in this new series of essays is to examine teaching from the ground up. I start, here, with a definition of teaching and with evidence that teaching occurs in at least some non-human animals. An examination of teaching in other species may lead to insights that will be useful for understanding teaching in our species.

Definition of Teaching

Teaching is behavior that is conducted by one individual (the teacher) for the purpose of helping another individual (the pupil) to learn something.

That's a simple definition, but it may need just a bit of elaboration. Notice that teaching, by this definition, is always a form of assistance. The key actor in any instance of learning is the learner; the teacher just helps.

The phrase for the purpose of, in the definition, rules out the great majority of cases in which one individual's actions help another individual to learn. We all learn an enormous amount by watching others do things, but that doesn't mean that those others are teaching us. They are teaching us, according to the definition, only if their actions are done for the purpose of helping us learn. I may learn to use a new coffee machine by watching you use it, but you taught me only if you used the machine primarily or at least partly for the purpose of enabling me to learn. An outside observer might judge that you were teaching me by noting that you beckoned me to watch, that you performed the actions with slow, exaggerated motions, or that you didn't drink the coffee you made.

I should add also that by purpose I mean function and do not mean to imply anything about consciousness of function. The function of teaching is to promote another's learning, just as the function of digestion is to get food molecules into the bloodstream and the function of the blink reflex is to prevent eye injury. When I say that ants teach other ants, I mean only that they engage in behaviors that came about (in this case through natural selection) for the function of helping other ants learn something, not that the ants are conscious of that function. We have no idea if other species of animals are conscious of teaching in the sense that you were conscious of teaching me to use the coffee machine.

Learning can be divided roughly into two categories--skill learning (learning how) and informational learning (learning that). Since teaching is always tied to learning, teaching comes in those same two categories--skill and informational. Both categories have been documented in nonhuman animals as well as in humans. Here are a few examples of both skill teaching and informational teaching in animals.

How Animals Help Their Young to Develop Skills

Providing materials and conditions for practice

Skill development, especially in mammals, often requires a great deal of practice. Young mammals come into the world highly motivated to practice the skills they need to survive, but in some cases they are unable, by themselves, to create the conditions necessary for practice. In these cases, teaching may occur simply by providing those conditions. Perhaps the best examples are found in cases of carnivores learning to hunt.

Kits, cubs, and pups, who must become good hunters in order to survive, spend endless hours practicing. They playfully chase and pounce on leaves blowing in the wind, and on each other, as ways of practice. But they also need practice with real prey, and to provide that practice the mother brings them real prey. In a groundbreaking series of field studies, Timothy Caro documented this for wild cheetahs.[1] At first, when the cubs are young, the mother cheetah brings them dead hares and gazelles, which they attack and eat. As they get older, however, she begins to bring back live hares and gazelles, which the cubs eagerly chase and attempt to capture. When the cubs fail to capture the live prey, as they almost always do at first, the mother chases it down and brings it back, so they can try again. She might do this several times before killing it so the cubs can eat. Eventually, after much of this practice, the young cheetahs became skilled at killing the prey themselves, and then they are ready to begin hunting on their own.

The mother cheetah's teaching is costly. It would be easier and less time-consuming for her to kill the game herself and give it dead to her cubs than to bring it back kicking and struggling and then to keep chasing it down as her cubs lose it. Moreover, Caro observed that sometimes the live prey gets away from the mother as well as from the cubs, resulting in loss of meat. Apparently, the gain to the cubs, in the development of their hunting skills, more than compensates for these costs.

Similar behavior is shown by mothers in many other predatory species. For example, mother meerkats (small mammals in the mongoose family) help their pups learn to kill and eat dangerous, stinging scorpions.[2] First the mother brings them dead scorpions, which they attack and eat. Then she brings them live scorpions with the stingers removed, until the pups are good at catching and killing them. Then, finally, she begins to bring them intact scorpions to kill.

We don't usually think of providing materials for practice as teaching, but it is one of the most valuable ways by which we humans help our children to learn, and it meets the criteria for teaching established by the definition above. By providing access to toys, tools, and other equipment, or by other means of altering their environment, we, like mother cheetahs and meerkats, enable our young to practice valuable skills. Children can't learn skills that they have no opportunity to practice.

Demonstrating

We humans are natural imitators. We learn most new skills by watching how others do them and then imitating what we saw. In his coauthored book The Anthropology of Education, David Lancy contends, with good evidence, that watching others is, worldwide, the primary means by which people, especially children, learn what they need to know. Most such learning doesn't require teaching; we learn from watching others who are just going about their daily business, oblivious of us. However, in some cases a helpful person takes the trouble to show us how to do something by performing it, directly in front of us, specifically for that purpose. That is one of the most important human ways of teaching.

Demonstrating is very rare in the nonhuman world. In fact, the only nonhuman animals that appear to demonstrate at all are chimpanzees, and even for them it is a rare occurrence. The only clearly documented instances of it so far involve mother chimps teaching their offspring how to crack nuts.

Chimpanzee nut cracking is fascinating, because it is among the rare examples of a culturally learned and culturally transmitted tradition among nonhumans. This behavior has only been observed among certain groups of chimpanzees in West Africa, and in those groups the behavior is passed along from generation to generation. Groups of chimps elsewhere don't treat hard-shelled nuts as food, because they have no way of opening them. In certain parts of West Africa, however, chimpanzees crack nuts by the technique of placing the nut on a large flat rock (the anvil) and striking it repeatedly with an appropriately shaped stone or heavy stick (the hammer). The woody shells of the nuts are very hard, and cracking them is difficult. The anvil, the hammer, and the means of striking have to be just right. Young chimpanzees require years of practice before they become skilled, and--as researchers Cristophe and Hedwige Boesch have documented---their mothers assist them.[3]