CULTURE‐CHANGE AND EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION IN MELANESIA: A CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Abstract

Perhaps it is academically improper to base a conceptual model upon personal conviction. This article develops a conceptual terminology for the interaction between educational administration and the dynamics of culture‐change in the Third World, Melanesian context of the 1970's. It is also the product of a growing conviction that educational administration sees itself, far too often, as an area of knowledge, western‐based, but yet capable of application to non‐western and Third World countries. Some western educational administrators, both scholars and practitioners, seem guilty of a latter‐day cultural imposition reminiscent of the middle‐class. Christian imposition of earlier colonial education systems. The alternative philosophy is that educational administration should be promoted and evaluated not according to “absolute” criteria but according to its appropriateness or inappropriateness for a particular, different and dynamic cultural context. In what follows this philosophy of cultural relativism is tested by arguing the hypothesis that traditionalist educational policy is inappropriate for Melanesian schools whereas local educational policy is appropriate.