Primary School Literature and Folktales in Kenya: What Makes a Children's Story African?

Abstract

Primary schooling is the terminal stage of education for most Kenyan children, preparing individuals with the cognitive, linguistic, and vocational skills that enable participation in the cash economy and transmitting important cultural and social values as well. These include, in addition to school, acquired secular, pluralistic, and egalitarian values embedded in the modern state and cultural knowledge and related values and behavior that are also imparted by families, age-set institutions, and rituals that punctuate the life cycle. In recent years, a great deal of concern has been expressed about the powerful socializing influence of schools and its implications for cultural maintenance. In Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, such concern has focused on the correspondence between what is taught and what is socially and politically valued on the assumption that the schools are neutral, universalistic institutions whose objectives, organization, and curricula can be localized to foster cultural maintenance. This view