Back to school: How formal education has shaped almost all of cognitive science

Societies which bind the heads of their children to produce distinctive cone-shaped skulls are a poor source of participants for the study of typical human cranial development. Just the same, schooled worlds - societies in which individuals are raised from birth by schooled parents, emerge into a world where formal schooling is mandatory and in which school skills increase success in most high-status jobs - are a poor source of participants for the study of typical human cognitive development. After all, formal schooling was absent for the first 99.8% of our species' history and has been shown to systematically alter cognitive organization across a wide variety of domains. Yet, almost all samples in almost all studies cognitive science are drawn from such schooled worlds - and at the same time mainstream, computational-cognitive science has no theoretical framework which would describe the nature of schooling effects. Here we argue that this situation is unsustainable and that we require frameworks which can capture these effects - reconciling work by the first-wave of cross cultural cognitive science on schooling with the contemporary mainstream of the field. We illustrate a candidate framework of this kind, based around a distinction in problem types between Big and Small Games. We use this distinction to structure a review of evidence that schooling effects have already been found, or should plausibly be expected, in a large sample of domains currently focused on by developmental cognitive science.