Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland 1

Abstract

Commissions and congresses have delivered judgement on education in one or another African society. Missionaries, anthropologists, itinerant journalists, travellers, Government officials, and innumerable others have vouchsafed opinions on the subject until it has become smothered in platitudes and generalizations. Education is a social process, a temporal concatenation of events in which the significant factor is time and the significant phenomenon is change. The problem presented by this function of society is of an entirely different order from that presented by the religious or economic or political system of a people. The former is primarily a problem of genetic psychology, the latter of cultural and sociological analysis. The process of education among the Tallensi, as among a great many other African peoples of analogous culture, is intelligible when it is recognized that the social sphere of adult and child is unitary and undivided.