The great philosopher stated that “Man is the only being who needs education.” Do animals not need education? Are there no teachers in the animal kingdom? As always, it depends on the definition.
Wikipedia tells us that a teacher is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue. This definition would already exclude animal teachers, as they are not persons. Then there is also the discussion of whether teaching requires the teacher to understand that s/he helps the student to acquire new skills and that s/he indeed intends to teach. Some scholars even argue that in order to teach, the teacher needs to know when knowledge and skills are missing or incomplete in the learner. But this is very difficult to prove. Instead, biologists have come up with a more functional definition: a “teacher” modifies her/his behavior in the presence of the “student.” For that, the teacher incurs some extra cost as s/he gains no immediate benefit by modifying his/her behavior. And of course, students have to learn as a result of the teacher’s behavior.
Teaching is common in all human cultures. But it is rarely seen in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, although one could imagine many situations in the life of a chimpanzee where teaching would be helpful. For example in nut-cracking: young chimpanzees have to practice for a very long time until they master this skill at around eight years of age. In a study in the Tai Forest in Ivory Coast, mother chimpanzees and their offspring were observed cracking nuts for seventy hours, but scientists found only two cases of active teaching. In these cases, the mothers intervened when their offspring made a mistake, and then they showed them how to do it correctly. In one case, a juvenile chimpanzee used the wrong side of her hammer. The mother took the tool out of her hand, turned it slowly into the right position in front of the little one, and cracked several nuts that the daughter was allowed to eat (Boesch, 1991).
This scene is very impressive. But imagine yourself watching for seventy hours as human parents and their children cook together. How many such scenes would you expect? How often would the parents improve their children's actions? Certainly much more often than is the case with chimpanzees!
However, what happens often in the animal kingdom is that mothers encourage certain behaviors in their children and provide learning opportunities. Chimpanzee mothers do this when they leave ripe nuts and stones for their offspring. Carnivores such as foxes, dingoes, cats, or otters sometimes release a prey animal in front of their young, thus giving them the opportunity to catch the prey again themselves. Alex Thornton and his colleagues have studied a similar behavior in the socially living meerkats of southern Africa. These cute animals live in groups of up to forty animals. The teachers among the meerkats adjust to their pupils' skill levels, as they gradually introduce them to greater challenges. They remove the sting of poisonous scorpions before leaving the tasty prey to the learning young. The older the students get, the more often they are given live scorpions for practice, even those with stings. After ninety days the young meerkats have learned everything they need to know about scorpions (Thornton & McAuliffe 2006) .
These observations from meerkats fulfill all the above-mentioned criteria for teaching: The teacher changes her/his behaviour only when the student is present. The teacher does not gain a direct advantage. Finally, the student learns faster and better than without this support. However, if you now want to conclude that these meerkat teachers intent to teach and consciously adapt to the abilities of their students, knowing what skills are missing, then you are wrong. Meerkat teachers just react to the calls of the youngsters. If they sound like baby meerkats, they will offer stingless scorpions, and if they sound like juveniles—they bring weakened scorpions with strings. These field experiments proved that one does not need a theory of mind in order to teach!
When we use the biological definition of teaching, we find teaching where we might not expect it. For example, tandem running ants lead other ants from the nest to food (Franks & Richardson 2006). And adult zebra finches use "babytalk." They alter the structure of their vocalizations when interacting with juveniles in ways that resemble how humans alter their speech when interacting with infants (Chen et al. 2016). There might be even a kind of teaching in the sea: Orcas hunt seals by stranding on the beach where seals are lying there. They grab a seal by their back fin, pull it into the water, and eat it. Scientists have now observed how adult orcas push their young towards the seals on the beach. If a young orca gets stuck on the beach, the adults create a wave with their fins so that the young animals can swim back into the sea. It was also observed that adults help the cubs to get back into deeper water when the prey attempt has failed (Baird 2002).
In sum, Kant was wrong here. There is teaching in the animal kingdom. However, overall teaching is rare. This is probably due to the extra costs that the teachers have to bear. It is likely that it has only evolved when young animals can learn a certain technique only with the help of others. That is why teaching is so important in the human world. Thus, Kant would have been correct if he had claimed: “Man is the being who needs education most."
References
Boesch C (1991) Teaching among wild chimpanzees. Animal Behaviour 41 (3): 530–532
Thornton A, McAuliffe K (2006) Teaching in wild meerkats. Science. 313(5784): 227-229.
Franks, N. R., & Richardson, T. (2006). Teaching in tandem-running ants. Nature, 439(7073): 153-153.
Chen, Y., Matheson, L. E., & Sakata, J. T. (2016). Mechanisms underlying the social enhancement of vocal learning in songbirds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(24): 6641.
Baird, Robin W. (2002). Killer Whales of the World. Stillwater, MN.: Voyageur Press. ISBN 978-0-7603-2654-1
