Education and Cultural Change in Africa

IN ANY ATTEMPT to deal with education as an agent of cultural change, a writer, of necessity, labors under many handicaps. The term education is itself a subject of controversy. Culture is a nebulous entity, and the processes by which it changes is still a matter for continued investigation. Even more formidable is the task of observing and grasping the two processes of education and cultural change in interaction, given the assumption that there is such interaction; for the general trend of social investigation, following the example so long obtaining in the natural sciences, is to isolate and analyze rather than to integrate and synthesize. Such inorganic and mechanistic investigation is not, on the face of it, the best means of determining what effects education has upon such a complex and carefully balanced entity as a functioning culture, especially when there is every evidence that the culture itself is rapidly changing irrespective of specific educational factors within it. The present approach to the subject owes more to holism than to analysis of parts and, in the absence of the kind of information that could be obtained only by closely integrated team work, relies mainly on personal experience and observation, suggesting only a theory that awaits investigation of the right kind. It is essentially the approach of an educationist sympathetic to and mindful of the findings of the sociologist and of the social anthropologist.