East African Societies by Shorter Aylward;

Author:Shorter, Aylward; [Shorter, Aylward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1542718
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

9

Socialization and education

In the traditional societies of East Africa children were prepared in a variety of ways for their place in the social life of the adult comunity.1 At one end of the scale were the numerous occasions when formal instruction was given; at the other, the experiences and voluntary associations of childhood which were all, in some way, determined by adult expectations. Such socialization or education for social life was wholly adequate for the relatively self-sufficient ethnic groups of the past. It was also fairly comprehensive, introducing the child or youth not only to the knowledge and skills appropriate for an adult of his or her sex, but also to the deeper values and beliefs of society, and to the various levels of identity and loyalty within the community. Today the educational picture is a hundred times more complex. As a consequence of the enlargement of social scale there has been a corresponding enlargement of scale in formal education. Formal education is a national concern, and young people have to be taught the skills needed to operate the highly complex machine of a modern nation-state. The appearance of the school, offering a European type of education, has triggered a revolution in East Africa. It has brought about the most far-reaching social transformation that the area has ever known, making possible national development and political independence. But the school has brought in its train a host of unexpected social problems and conflicts. Besides the competition between the school and traditional forms of socialization, there has often been a failure on the part of the school to cater for all the different levels and facets of modern social life, and more disturbing still, it is now being asked whether the European type of school system inherited from colonial times is an adequate vehicle for promoting the new political ideologies and development programmes, and whether the school is capable of being invested with wider social functions than it has hitherto enjoyed.

In traditional society, the African child was educated by a community for membership of the community. Most ethnic groups had distinctive birth-rites, in many of which the expectations of the community towards the new-born child were acted out. In these rites, neighbours sometimes mimed the adult activities appropriate to the sex of the child, hunting in the case of a boy, sweeping and cooking in the case of a girl. Such rites were a clear manifestation of the interest of the whole community in the up-bringing of the child. Later on, the child’s whole education would be group-orientated. Special emphasis would be placed on behaviour outside the home, on correct social relationships, courtesies, rights and duties. The child would be taught to obey and serve all the adults in the community, and when an adult punished a neighbour’s child, such an action met more often with the approval than the resentment of the parents.

Within the family community there was a shared responsibility for the child’s upbringing. At different stages in its development,

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