Formal Education and Individual Modernity in an African Society

Abstract

The theoretical proposition that formal Western education exerts a modernizing influence on youth in traditional, non-Western societies is tested using structured interview data from a probability area sample of 591 seventeen-year-old males in Kano, Nigeria. Cross-tabular analysis provides evidence of clear and consistent educational influence on modern value orientations which is largely independent of selectivity factors and alternative modernizing forces. The effects are found to be quite uniform across different categories of youth, but variable across different value orientations. There is also limited evidence that school curriculum may be more important than organizational aspects of schools in shaping modern perspectives.