Schooling is ubiquitous in the modern world and academic development is now a critical aspect of preparation for adulthood. A step back in time to pre-modern societies and an examination of life in remaining traditional societies today reveals that universal formal schooling is an historically recent phenomenon. This evolutionary and historical recency has profound implications for understanding academic development, including how instructional practices modify evolved or biological primary abilities (e.g., spoken language) to create evolutionarily novel or biologically secondary academic competencies (e.g., reading). We propose the development of secondary abilities promotes the emergence of academic self-concepts that in turn are supported by evolved systems for self-awareness and self-knowledge. Unlike some forms of self-knowledge (e.g., relative physical abilities) that appear to be universal and central to many people’s overall self-concept, the relative importance of academic self-concepts are expected to be dependent on explicit social and cultural supports for their valuation. These culturally contingent self-concepts are contrasted with universal social and physical self-concepts, with implications for understanding variation students’ relative valuation of academic competencies and their motivations to engage in academic learning.

学校教育在现代世界无处不在，学术发展现在是为成年做准备的一个重要方面。将时间倒退到前现代社会，审视当今仍然存在的传统社会的生活，就会发现普及正规学校教育是历史上最近才出现的现象。这种进化和历史近因对理解学术发展具有深远的意义，包括教学实践如何修改进化或生物学的主要能力（例如，口语）以创造进化上新颖的或生物学上的次要学术能力（例如，阅读）。我们提出，二次能力的发展促进了学术自我概念的出现，而这些自我概念又得到了自我意识和自我知识的进化系统的支持。不同于某些形式的自我知识（例如，相对身体能力）似乎对许多人的整体自我概念来说是普遍的和核心的，学术自我概念的相对重要性预计将取决于明确的社会和文化支持，以对其进行评估。这些因文化而异的自我概念与普遍的社会和身体自我概念形成对比，对理解不同学生对学术能力的相对评价及其参与学术学习的动机具有重要意义。