The sustainability of a society depends on the transmission of cultural knowledge between generations. This study examines how that transmission occurs in 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, where leaders tend to lack coercive power. Specifically, the study examines differences between the transmission of so-called “instrumental culture” (which includes skills such as how to do subsistence tasks) and what the authors call “opaque culture”, meaning abstract societal values and norms (e.g. rules of sharing and symbolic culture, such as religious beliefs). Using ethnographic data, the study finds that opaque culture is almost always conveyed through explicit teaching (rather than observation or imitation), often during middle childhood (ages 8 – 12). Among the 23 egalitarian societies in the sample in particular, adult community leaders, or other socially influential adult individuals, were most likely to be the ones engaging in teaching.