Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation
Page 19
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
The fashion in which their sex practice reduces the possibility of neuroses has already been discussed.^ By discounting our category of perversion, as applied to practice, and reserving it for the occasional psychic pervert, they legislate a whole field of neurotic possibility out of existence. Onanism, homosexuality, statistically unusual forms of heterosexual activity, are neither banned nor institutionalised. The wider range which these practices give prevents the development of obsessions of guilt which are so frequent a cause of maladjustment among us. The more varied practices permitted heterosexually preserve any individual from being penalised for special conditioning. This accept- | an£e_o£jajffiid£r..range as,."normal" provides a cultural/! atmosphere in which frigidity and psychic impotence do / not occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment inf marriage can always be established. —The acceptancej of such an attitude without in any way accepting promiscuity would go a long way towards solving many marital impasses and emptying our park benches and our houses of prostitution.
Among the factors in the Samoan scheme of life J which are influential in producing stable, well-adjusted, robust individualsjv the organisation of the family and the attitude towards sex are undoubtedly the most im-.^^^portantr) But it is necessary to note also the general ^3^educational concept which disapproves of precocity and coddles the slow, the laggard, the inept. In a society where the tempo of life was faster, the rewards greater,
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
the amount of energy expended larger, the bright children might develop symptoms of boredom. But the slower pace dictated by the climate, the complacent, peaceful society, and the c.Q0ap£a§gfeQ4^ SiL th& iaiKSi in its blatant precocious display of individuality which drains off some of the discontent which the bright child feels, prevent any child from becoming too bored. And the dullard is not goaded and dragged along faster than he is able until, sick with making an impossible effort, he gives up entirely. This educational policy also tends to blur individual differences and so to minimise jealousy, rivalry, emulation, those social attitudes which arise out of discrepancies of endowment and are so far-reaching in their efiFects upon the adult personality.
It is one way of solving the problem of differences between individuals and a method of solution exceedingly congenial to a strict adult world. The longer the child is kept in a subject, non-initiating state, the more I of the general cultural attitude it will absorb, the less i' of a disturbing element it will become. Furthermore, if time is given them, the dullards can learn enough to provide a stout body of conservatives upon whose shoulders the burden of the civilisation can safely rest. Giving titles to young men would put a premium upon the exceptional J giving titles to men of forty, who have at last acquired sufficient training to hold them, assures the continuation of the usual. It also discourages the brilliant so that their social contribution is slighter than it might otherwise have been.
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
We are slowly feeling our way towards a solution of this problem, ac least in the case of formal education. LTntil very recently our educational system offered only two very partial solutions of the difficulties inherent in a great discrepancy between children of different endowment and different rates of development. One solution was to allow a sufficiently long time to each educational step so that all but the mentally defective could succeed, a method similar to the Samoan one and without its compensatory dance floor. The bright child, held back, at intolerably boring tasks, unless he was fortunate enough to find some other outlet for his unused energy, was likely to expend it upon truancy and general delinquency. Our only alternative to this was "skipping" a child from one grade to another, relying upon the child's superior intelligence to bridge the gaps. This was a method congenial to American enthusiasm for meteoric careers from canal boat and log cabin to the White House. Its disadvantages in giving the child a sketchy, discontinuous background, in removing it from its age group, have been enumerated too often to need repetition here. But it is worthy of note that with a very different valuation of individual ability than that entertained by Samoan society we used for years one solution, similar and less satisfactory than theirs, in our formal educational attempts.
The methods which experimental educators are substituting for these unsatisfactory solutions, schemes like the Dalton Plan, or the rapidly moving classes in
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
which a group of children can move ahead at a high, even rate of speed without hurt to themselves or to their duller fellows, is a striking example of the results of applying reason to the institutions of our society. The old red school-house was almost as haphazard and accidental a phenomenon as the Samoan dance floor. It was an institution which had grown up in response to a vaguely felt, unanalysed need. Its methods were analogous to the methods used by primitive peoples, non-rationalised solutions of pressing problems. But the institutionalisation of different methods of education for children of different capacities and different rates of development is not like anything which we find in Samoa or in any other primitive society. It is the conscious, intelligent directing of human institutions in response to observed human needs. ^ Still another factor in Samoan education which re-' suits in different attitudes is the place of work and play in the children's lives. Samoan children do not learn to work through learning to play, as the children of many primitive peoples do. Nor are they permitted a •/ period of lack of responsibility such as our children are allowed. From the time they are four or five years old they perform definite tasks, graded to their strength and intelligence, but still tasks which have a meaning in the structure of the whole society. This does not mean that they have less time for play than American children who are shut up in schools from
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
nine to three o'clock every day. Before the introduction of schools to complicate the ordered routine of their lives, the time spent by the Samoan child in running errands, sweeping the house, carrying water, and taking actual care of the baby, was possibly less ^than that which the American school child devotes to her studies.
The difference lies not in the proportion of time in which their activities are directed and the proportion in which they are free, but rather in the difference of attitude. With the professionalisation of education and the specialisation of industrial tasks which has stripped the individual home of its former variety of activities, our children are not made to feel that the time they do devote to supervised activity is functionally related to the world of adult activity. Although this lack of connection is more apparent than real, it is still sufficiently vivid to be a powerful determinant in the child's attitude. The Samoan girl who tends babies, carries water, sweeps the floor j or the little boy who digs for bait, or collects cocoanuts, has no such difficulty. The necessary nature of their tasks is obvious. jAnd the». practice of giving a child a task which he can do well and never permitting a childish, inefficient tinkering with adult apparatus, such as we permit to our children, who bang aimlessly and destructively on their fathers' typewriters, results in a different attitude to^ wards work.'^American children spendTiours in schools learning tasks whose visible relation to their mothers'
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
and fathers' activities is often quite impossible to recognise. Their participation in adults' activities is either in terms of toys, tea-sets and dolls and toy automobiles, or else a meaningless and harmful tampering with the electric light system. (It must be understood that here, as always, when I say American, I do not mean those Americans recently arrived from Europe, who still present a different tradition of education. Such a group would be the Southern Italians, who still expect productive work from their children.) I So our children make a false set of categories, work, play, and school j work for adults, play for children's 1 pleasure, and schools as an inexplicable nuisance with I some compensations. These false distinctions are likely to produce all sorts of strange attitudes, an apathetic treatme
nt of a school which bears no known relation to life, a false dichotomy between work and play, which may result either in a dread of work as implying irksome responsibility or in a later contempt for play as childish.
The Samoan child's dichotomy is different. Work » consists of those necessary tasks which keep the social life going: planting and harvesting and preparation of food, fishing, house-building, mat-making, care of children, collecting of property to validate marriages and births and succession to titles and to entertain strangers, these are the necessary activities of life, activities in which every member of the community, down to the ' smallest child, has a part. Work is not a way of ac-
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
quiring leisure j where every household produces its own food and clothes and furniture, where there is no large amount of fixed capital and households of high rank are simply characterised by greater industry in the discharge of greater obligations, our whole picture of saving, of investment, of deferred enjoyment, is completely absent. (There is even a lack of clearly defined seasons of harvest, which would result in special abundance of food and consequent feasting. Food is always abundant, except in some particular village where a few weeks of scarcity may follow a period of lavish entertaining.) Rather, work is something which goes on all the time for every onej no one is exempt j few are overworked. There is social reward for the industrious, social toleration for the man who does barely enough. And there is always leisure—leisure, be it noted, which is not.the result of hard work or accumulated capital at all, but is merely the result of a kindly climate, a small population, a well-integrated social system, and no social demands for spectacular expenditure. And play is what one does with the time left over from working, a way of filling in the wide spaces in a structure of unirksome work.
Play includes dancing, singing, games, weaving necklaces of flowers, flirting, repartee, all forms of sex activity. And there are social institutions like the ceremonial inter-village visit which partake of both work and play. But the distinctions between work as something one has to do but dislikes, and play as something
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
one wants to do; of work as the main business of adults, play as the main concern of children, are conspicuously absent. Children's play is like adults' play in kind, interest, and in its proportion to work. And the Sa-moan child has no desire to turn adult activities into play, to translate one sphere into the other. I had a box of white clay pipes for blowing soap bubbles sent me. The children were familiar with soap bubbles, but their native method of blowing them was very inferior to the use of clay pipes. But after a few minutes' delight in the unusual size and beauty of the soap bubbles, one little girl after another asked me if she might please take her pipe home to her mother, for pipes were meant to smoke, not to play with. Foreign dolls did not interest them, and they have no dolls of their own, although children of other islands weave dolls from the palm leaves from which Samoan children weave balls. They never make toy houses, nor play house, nor sail toy boats. Little boys would climb into a real outrigger canoe and practise paddling it within the safety of the lagoon. This whole attitude gave a greater coherence to the children's lives than we often afford our children.
The Intelligibility of a child's life among us Is measured only In terms of the behaviour of other children. If all the other children go to school the child who does not feels Incongruous In their midst. If the little girl next door Is taking music lessons, why can't Maryj or why must Mary take music lessons, if the other lit-
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
tie girl doesn't take them. But so sharp is our sense of difference between the concerns of children and of adults that the child does not learn to judge its own behaviour in relationship to adult life. So children often learn to regard play as something inherently undignified, and as adults mangle pitifully their few moments of leisure. But the Samoan child measures her every act of work or play in terms of her whole community J each item of conduct is dignified in terms of its realised relationship to the only standard she knows, the life of a Samoan village. So complex and stratified a society as ours cannot hope to develop spontaneously any such simple scheme of education. Again we will be hard put to it to devise ways of participation for children, and means of articulating their school life with the rest of life which will give them the same dignity which Samoa affords her children.
..Last among the cultural differences which may influence the emotional stability of the child is the lack of pressure to make important choices. Children are urged to learn, urged to behave, urged to work, but they are not urged to hasten in the choices which they make themselves. The first point at which this attitude makes itself felt is in the matter of the brother and sister taboo, a cardinal point of modesty and decency. Yet the exact stage at which the taboo should be observed is always left to the younger child. When it reaches a point of discretion, of understanding, it will of itself feel "ashamed" and establish the formal
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
barrier which will last until old age. Likewise, sex activity is never urged upon the young people, nor marriage forced upon them at a tender age. Where the possibilities of deviation from the accepted standard are so slight, a few years leeway holds no threat for the society. The child who comes later to a realisation of the brother and sister taboo really endangers nothing.
This laissez faire attitude has been carried over into the Samoan Christian Church. The Samoan saw no reason why young unmarried people should be pressed to make momentous decisions which would spoil part of their fun in life. Time enough for such serious matters after they were married or later still, when they were quite sure of what steps they were taking and were in less danger of falling from grace every month or so. The missionary authorities, realising the virtues of going slowly and sorely vexed to reconcile Samoan sex ethics with a Western European code, saw the great disadvantages of unmarried Church members who were not locked up in Church schools. Consequently, far from urging the adolescent to think upon her soul the native pastor advises her to wait until she is older, which she is only too glad to do.
But, especially in the case of our Protestant churches, there is a strong preference among us for the appeal to youth. The Reformation, with its emphasis upon individual choice, was unwilling to accept the tacit habitual Church membership which was the Catholic
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OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
pattern, a membership marked by additional sacramental gifts but demanding no sudden conversion, no renewal of religious feeling. But the Protestant solution is to defer the choice only so far as necessary, and the moment the child reaches an age which may be called "years of discretion" it makes a strong, dramatic appeal. This appeal is reinforced by parental and social pressure 3 the child is bidden to choose now and wisely. While such a position in the churches which stem from the Reformation and its strong emphasis on individual choice was historically inevitable, it is regrettable that the convention has lasted so long. It has even been taken over by non-sectarian reform groups, all of whom regard the adoles cent child as the mos t legitimate field.of. activity.
In all of these comparisons between Samoan and American culture, many points are useful only in throwing a spotlight upon our own solutions, while in others it is possible to find suggestions for change. Whether or not we envy other peoples one of their solutions, our attitude towards our own solutions must be greatly broadened and deepened by a consideration of the way in which other peoples have met the same problems. Realising that our own ways are not hu- ' manly inevitable nor God-ordained, but are the fruit of a long and turbulent history, we may well examine in turn all of our institutions, thrown into strong relief against the history of other civilisations, and weighing them in the balance, be not afraid to find them wanting.
EDUCATION FOR CHOICE
WE have been comparing point for point, our civilisation and the simpler civilisation of Samoa, in order to illuminate our own methods of education.
If now we turn from the Samoan picture and take away only the main lesson which we learned there, that adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so, can we draw any conclusions which might bear fruit In the training of our adolescents? At first blush the answer seems simple enough. If . adolescents are only plunged into difficulties and distress because of conditions in their social environment, then by all means let us so modify that environment as to reduce this stress and eliminate this strain and anguish of adjustment. But, unfortunately, the conditions which vex our adolescents are the flesh and bone of our society, no more subject to straightforward manipulation upon our part than is the language which we speak. We can alter a syllable here, a construction there J but the great and far-reaching changes in linguistic structure (as in all parts of culture) are the work of time, a work in which each individual plays an unconscious and inconsiderable part. The principal