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The purpose of the paper is to develop the theory that structural or procedural changes in institutions precede changes in education in a society. It examines the development of pre-modern institutions in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and the influences this had on growth in literacy rates within these states. Literacy rates in Western European countries during the Middle Ages were below twenty percent of the population. For most countries, literacy rates did not experience significant increases until the Enlightenment and industrialization. Two early exceptions to this broad trend were the Netherlands and England, which had achieved literacy rates above fifty percent of their populations by the mid-seventeenth century. The explanations for these divergent trends are the structural changes in formal institutions that embodied capital markets, protected private property, and overall established the initial steps in developing modern political institutions. This created incentives to invest more in schools per capita as well as incentives for a middle class to invest more in literacy and numeracy skills for a market-exchange economy that was becoming more specialized in division of labor.

The purpose of this study is to argue that formal education had multiple, independent origins in the emergence of ancient civilizations, for universally the same reasons. It uses socio-biological literature to outline the nature of human societies; ethnographic literature to show that no systems of formal education existed in small-scale hunter-gatherer communities; and evolutionary psychological literature, specifically the cognitive niche theory of human evolution, and domain-specific brain module theories, to show how children learn. The second section details the organizational changes that occurred in the emergence of civilization and why this required the development of formal institutions of education. The study uses four ancient civilizations--Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica--to provide evidence for the paper's argument. The study offers a theory for the relationship between the structural organization of human societies and the implications this has for social learning. Overall, it provides a working theory for how and why formal education first emerged in human societies, due to the administrative tools needed to keep a state-level society functioning.