Education and national development
It is suggested in this paper that educators give serious thought to boarding schools to help reduce the cumulative achievement deficit between most middle and lower class children in the United States. The author recalls his own experience with boarding schools in Nigeria, reviews the ineffectiveness of compensatory education in America, and summarizes the history of residential schooling in Europe and North America. It is pointed out that many of the privileged in this society have long enjoyed the alternative of boarding schools while the only residential institutions available to most of the poor are the armed forces and the puoiit j~ils.
Formal Education and Individual Modernity in an African Society
The theoretical proposition that formal Western education exerts a modernizing influence on youth in traditional, non-Western societies is tested using structured interview data from a probability area sample of 591 seventeen-year-old males in Kano, Nigeria. Cross-tabular analysis provides evidence of clear and consistent educational influence on modern value orientations which is largely independent of selectivity factors and alternative modernizing forces. The effects are found to be quite uniform across different categories of youth, but variable across different value orientations. There is also limited evidence that school curriculum may be more important than organizational aspects of schools in shaping modern perspectives.
Aspects of Westernization: A Study of Adult-Class Students in Ghana: II
r NHERE is an extensive literature concerning changes in social structure and economic conditions in Africa,2 but apart from the work of Biesheuvel3 and Doob,4 systematic information about beliefs and attitudes seems to be scarce. The aim of this study, undertaken in I955, was to fill this gap for one particular area. An attempt was made to assess the balance of traditional versus western values in some crucial areas of life, for one section of the literate community. The actual survey was preceded by a series of intensive interview studies of some 200 adolescents and adults, designed to elicit the necessary background information concerning the types of beliefs and attitudes prevalent among literates. Whilst there is no space for a separate report on the results of this, they were used in arriving at the conclusions outlined. However, the primary object was to make them the basis for the construction of a questionnaire, which was administered by the writer. With two exceptions (a teachers' training college and a school for Local Government Officers) all groups of respondents consisted of members of evening classes organized by the People's Educational Association (P.E.A.), the equivalent of the W.E.A. in this country. Most of them had a good command of English, being able to follow serious lectures and to write essays for their tutors. In the smaller towns and villages, P.E.A. members are drawn from the literate elite of their community; their eagerness and hard work is reminiscent of the early days of the W.E.A. in Britain. In addition to Accra, fourteen other active centres within a range of about 50 miles from the capital were covered.5