P. Lehari Lekha
- Lehari Lekha
Cockroaches do not have teachers!
Female cockroaches produce egg cases (oothecae) containing 10-50 eggs each and deposit them in warm and humid locations – and move on. A female cockroach goes on to lay hundreds of eggs in different places over her lifetime. The eggs undergo incubation for three to eight weeks; nymphs emerge and molt, and may take up to a year to attain maturity, all without any parenting.
Though many cockroaches die as nymphs, the population growth of cockroaches is exponential due to the drastically high number of offspring. This fecund nature of cockroaches, their ability to widely disperse offspring and their small body size categorizes them under r-strategists, according to an evolutionary biology theory called r/K selection theory.
This theory tries to explain the trade-off between quantity and quality of offspring in a particular species. Cockroaches, mosquitoes, flies, dandelions, and rabbits are all examples of r-strategists. These species provide no parental care or guidance whatsoever to their offspring. Such r-strategist species have high mortality rates while prioritizing rapid reproduction and colonizing new habitats to exploit temporary, unpredictable, and unstable environments. They prefer environments affected by natural disasters or war so that they can use abundant resources and sunlight with no competition.
On the other hand, species that produce fewer offspring and live longer have different strategies to enable survival of their offspring. Giant Redwood trees, primarily found in California, US, are the tallest and longest-
“While many animals, and non-human primates live in social groups – called troops in monkeys and herds in other mammals – mainly for protection, human communities are unique in their size and complexity of social differentiation and hierarchy. Human children, therefore, need to not only learn to survive the environment but also to align with the social fabric of the community.”
living trees in the world, with lifespans exceeding 2000 years. Successful germination in redwoods is quite low even though they produce many seeds.
These trees demonstrate unique strategies to support themselves and their immediate community by growing cloned versions of themselves in an unusual radial, circular pattern, also known as a fairy ring. The young sprouts get a terrific “head start” from the nutrients of the mature parent tree and surrounding root structure. The fairy ring outcompetes other species for light and resources with their size, shade creation, and rot-resistant wood. Mature redwood trees capture significant amounts of water from coastal fog through their leaves, which then drips to the forest floor, benefiting themselves and the understory plants. The fairy ring stands out as a representation of the strong support and nurture also found in mushrooms, Stipagrostis grass, foxglove flowers, and, Irish moss. These species demonstrate K-selection, as per the r/K selection theory.
K-strategists like elephants provide intense communal care to their young. Among elephants, the entire herd from mothers to allomothers* provide constant protection, reassurance, and teaching of survival skills to the calves. Similarly, in whales, the mother as well as the adult whales around the newborn, guide it to the surface for its first breath of air. Mother whales are highly protective and will place themselves between their calves and any threat they perceive. The mother whale also teaches the calf vital skills, including migration routes, communication vocalizations (sometimes “whispering” to avoid detection by predators), and specific hunting techniques like bubble-net feeding in humpbacks.
Donkeys support their foals by exhibiting threatening postures towards other donkeys and also by teaching them crucial behaviours and social skills for survival. The common theme in these examples is extensive long duration childcare. K-strategist species create an enabling and encouraging environment for their offspring to help them develop instinctive traits.
Humans, being the apex species in the world we know, are classic K-strategists. We have a prolonged infant and juvenile stage, taking many years to become independent mature adults. Humans are more helpless as infants than other mammals. A healthy foal or calf would begin to walk and run about 30 minutes after birth, while a human child may take up to a year to begin to take tentative steps.
Human child-rearing requires considerable investment of time, resources, and energy on the part of parents and alloparents to raise our children. Resources are required even after individual independence, for our long lifespans. As we see, children who receive little or no parenting, or poor parenting due to lack of economic resources, or are displaced due to war, climate change, or natural disasters often succumb to hunger or disease.
While many animals, and non-human primates live in social groups – called troops in monkeys and herds in other mammals – mainly for protection, human communities are unique in their size and complexity of social differentiation and hierarchy. Human children, therefore, need to not only learn to survive the environment but also to align with the social fabric of the community.
This is probably the reason why in humans teaching is professionalised and outsourced, after a certain age. Teachers are respected and valued members of their community and receive the trustand gratitude ofthe community
for being guardians of the young, and for enabling young people in the community to learn to survive, evolve and develop. Although derived from the quintessential biological requirement of the species, teachers have become repositories of knowledge and of pedagogy*, and for standardising modes and methods of imparting knowledge and skills.
Learning is a social process as well. The role of teachers expands to shaping our behaviour, attitudes, and emotional responses and reactions, and we learn through our own observation and imitation. When a particular behaviour, like self-discipline, is consistently rewarded by teachers, it will persist.
Unlike other animals, who learn how to survive in their environment, humans radically alter theirs. So do other species like birds building nests – but in a limited way. Teaching therefore needs to help in that endeavour too. Productive economic activities such as manufacturing, transportation, and professional services that have altered the planet’s ecosystem require complex knowledge and skills, which vastly exceed our instinctual capacity and can only be transmitted through professional teaching and mentoring. Institutions built and developed for teaching of young provide controlled exposure to the real world and provide diverse environments for the pupil to slowly learn to cope with, respond to and suitably alter the environment.
Human population size varies across the globe, and while efforts are being made across the world to reduce our population, some countries are facing the issue of extremely low birth rate. In many developed countries like Finland and Japan, birth rates have fallen far below sustainable levels, and governments are encouraging adults to have more children. In these countries, children become all the more important and precious, and there is greater focus on the quality of education and teaching to ensure the survival of their community.
Survival of human communities also depends on the steps taken to transmit knowledge about the history, heritage, traditions, replenishment of resources, and culture of the community. The African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”, emphasises that child-rearing is a shared responsibility of the community, requiring the collective effort of parents, family, friends, teachers, and other adults, so as to provide children with safety, guidance, and diverse experiences for healthy development, emphasizing shared values and support. In regions which suffer violent destruction of fabric of society, like natural disasters, bombing, terrorism, or communal violence, the role of teachers who impart accumulated human knowledge is disrupted.
Consider this – even if half of the eggs produced by an r-strategist species dies in every generation, the species would still not only survive, but thrive. On the other hand, among humans, if adults were to miraculously lose the ability to nurture, parent, teach, and communicate knowledge to the offspring, the helpless infants would quickly perish. In summation, if there were no teachers, our species would die out pretty quickly.
