My commentary is aimed at broadening Kline's reasoning about social dilemmas, deceptive teaching, and pupils' resistance to that teaching.

In comparison with nonhuman animals, many more actors with different interests and aims are involved in human teaching and education. Humans create more and more social tools to manage and control others' teaching and education. As a result, human civilization has a well-differentiated and permanently developing system of special social tools, institutions, and types of positive and negative work with teaching/learning (Poddiakov Reference Poddiakov2012). Positive work, or stimulation of teaching/learning, is more explicit and better studied. Negative work is usually more hidden.

The negative work includes three subtypes: denying teaching to another subject, aggressive counteraction to others' teaching/learning, and “Trojan horse” teaching. Counteraction or denying teaching is often prompted by the need to defend – either pupils, or other people from the pupils. Humans counteract teaching and learning activities that seem dangerous, abusive, or inappropriate. (Naturally, some people are skeptical about it and try to teach and learn these activities.) Trojan horse teaching is caused by the wish to get benefits from the ignorance and mistakes of pupils perceived as either prey (i.e., sources of benefits) or as potential competitors who must be stopped. For if “the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage” (De Geus Reference De Geus1988, p. 3), then a blow at the ability to learn and master new types of activity is an effective means of weakening the competitor (Poddiakov Reference Poddiakov2004).

Trojan horse teaching with evil intent has some analogies with host manipulation by parasites: Many brain parasites change the behavior of their hosts (insects, fishes, mammals, etc.) so that the hosts behave in a way harmful for themselves but favorable for the parasites (Cézilly Reference Cézilly2005; Hughes et al. Reference Hughes, Brodeur and Thomas2012; Lafferty Reference Lafferty2006). Naturally, the parasites act on the hosts' nervous systems and brains via physical and chemical influences, not via social ones as in humans' Trojan horse teaching, which was invented later. Yet, both kinds of manipulation are, to use Kline's terms, “modification[s] of one individual's behavior by another's influence” (sect. 6.2, para. 1) working at different levels.

Not only teachers, but pupils themselves may seek to impede other pupils' learning. Moreover, a pupil can try to stop competitors' learning via influencing a teacher. Alexander the Great wrote to his teacher, Aristotle, that the latter should not publish his doctrine to preserve Alexander's pre-eminence over all the others (Plutarch Reference Plutarch2000, pp. 218–19). However, in some situations, pupils may help each other to learn.

There are complex interplays of positive and negative aims, and different kinds of assistance and counteraction in teaching/learning – without one-to-one matches between selfish behaviors and counteractions or between altruism and help in teaching. Both counteraction to teaching and Trojan horse teaching are realized not only because of actors' selfish interests but also to help pupils. For example, Trojan horse teaching with good intentions (i.e., with a hidden agenda of developing the students) is used when organizers believe that the content of education that the student needs would cause the student's resentment or would not be assimilated properly if presented upfront. Some educators consider educational computer programs as good Trojan horses helping students to master those disciplines (e.g., mathematics, logic, etc.) which they are unwilling or unable to learn in the traditional way (Bailey Reference Bailey, Teixeira, Hansmann and McGrath1999; Boyle Reference Boyle2001; White Reference White, Ali, Kamil, Baharum, Mustafa, Ismail and Ravichandran2004). The need for such teaching with hidden aims and content arises from the divergence of the goals and interests of the organizers and the students, which leads to a kind of manipulative strategy of teaching.

On the whole, humans support and stimulate teaching and learning towards definite directions, in definite domains, in definite periods (e.g., historical or professional or age development periods), often in a certain group of people, and so forth; and, conversely, humans counteract teaching and learning in certain areas (e.g., dangerous and/or competitive ones), in certain periods, and among some people. Such stimulation and inhibition takes place at the micro-, meso-, and macro-social levels – from a level of informal interpersonal relations to a level of state laws and foreign relationships.

In contrast to nonhuman animals, this complex positive and negative work includes meta-teaching: explicit knowledge of whether to teach or not to teach in different areas (Barnes & Cavaliere Reference Barnes and Cavaliere2009; Poddiakov Reference Poddiakov2004); how to conduct Trojan horse teaching; how to detect deceptive teaching and resist it; how to study teaching and learning; and so forth. And the target article, “How to learn about teaching…,” along with the multiple commentaries on it, is a part of this explicating work.

I do not know of analogies to such systems of tools and activities in nonhuman animals, but in any case one should try to reveal their evolutionary and cultural foundations and mechanisms.

A crucial, and paradoxical, adaptive problem for teachers is that, rather than the simple copying of necessary knowledge and behaviors by pupils while learning, there should be a creative design of developing education, teaching, and learning, of the kind that equips pupils for learning and acting in future environments – which are more or less unknown and unpredictable for the teachers, and in which the teachers may not be sufficiently competent.

Let me introduce a formalism describing constructiveness of teaching/learning strategies:

$$Constr = N^{\prime}C^{\prime} - NC$$

where Constr=constructiveness of the teaching/learning strategy; N and C=novelty and complexity of problems which an agent (a being, an organization, etc.) can raise and solve before teaching/learning; N′ and C′=the parameters after teaching/leaning.

If Constr > 0, the teaching/learning strategy is constructive (positive), and if Constr < 0, it is destructive (negative). It seems that the constructiveness-destructiveness of teaching/learning is related not only to educational technologies per se, but also to some general properties of a social system in which teaching/learning is realized. It would be interesting to compare the constructiveness of teaching/learning strategies in societies with different Global Peace Indexes (Estes Reference Estes and Michalos2014) or Moral State of Society Indexes (Iurevich & Ushakov Reference Iurevich and Ushakov2010).

The cognitive and educational paradoxes of developing constructive teaching/learning cannot be solved without solving cooperative, psychological, social, and moral dilemmas – an important part of which Kline has started to analyze.