Paradise Lost and Regained. Educational policy in Melanesia

Abstract

Some analysts of Third World education bemoan the nineteenth century intrusion of the western, mission school upon a Utopian traditional context. At best the missionising impulse of the Christian church was misguided; at worst it was vicious in the cultural damage done in the name of God. So goes a modem criticism. However, the twentieth century is witnessing a latter day cultural imposition just as high-minded as the earlier one and just as culturally disruptive. Educational policy is to be directed towards the renaissance of traditional Third World man; that which was lost through schooling is to be regained through schooling. The dysfunctionalism of such policy is the outcome of administrative misperception which reckons it to be enculturative whereas it is as acculturative as the mission school when it first arrived. The traditionalist educational policy is acculturative, simply because the past is not the present, and present local values are significantly different from past, traditional ones. Enculturative educational policy transmits that which is newly present as well as the enduring elements of a cultural heritage. Traditionalist educational policy is acculturative because it ignores new knowledge, new aspirations, new attitudes to school-all of which have evolved from the assimilation and accommodation which patterned the dynamics of the traditional-colonial confrontation. Furthermore, traditionalist educational policy is inappropriate for a present, local context to the extent that it disregards the transmission of new knowledge and values. Of concern here are traditionalist educational policies encapsulated in contemporary Development Plans of some Melanesian island-nations (see Fig. 1). The theme underlying analysis of these Plans is that policy should be analysed and assessed in terms of its appropriateness for a present, local context, not for a past, traditional context. For example, if the educational policy is intended to be enculturative rather than acculturative, and if parents are generally in favour of academic curricula leading to formal examinations - this being the model of school assimilated by Melanesian parents - then the appropriate educational policy maintains such curricula and such formal examinations. If this is indeed the situation, then a Department of Education is misguided if it endorses the current western slogan of community involvement in education and, in the name of this panacea, proposes curricula orientated towards a rural, subsistence life, instruction in the vernacular, and shifts control of secondary school selection to village laymen. In fact the traditionalist value-orientation running through such policies is acculturative rather than enculturative. It must be reckoned something of a latter-day imposition when educational policy seeks to provide schools with a rural, vernacular traditional orientation for parents and children who aspire to membership of the urban cash economy of the modernising sector.