ABSTRACT

This chapter reviews the role of culture in the development of teaching and learning, particularly changes in conceptions of teaching and learning in the knowledge society and the conceptual implications that learning and teaching have. Learning is not exclusively human. All animals learn. As Steven Pinker explains, the ability to learn appeared in some ancestor of multicellular animals and probably guided the evolution of nervous systems towards the specialization of neuronal circuits. The evidence provided by studies of human development are very extensive and agree that already in the first year of life children manifest an innate inclination to cooperate. The sociologist of education Mariano Fernández Enguita gives an overview of socio-educational changes. The chapter presents it in a very schematic way. This fundamental idea of unilateral transmission of knowledge from adult to young person or child is based on a delivery model where teacher holds the monopoly of knowledge and operates in the format "I teach – you learn".