Footnotes

Education? It's

Been Here

For Centuries

gOME years ago 1 heard the guest speaker at a college graduation ceremony say that “before 1946 there was no education in Papua New Guinea”.

He was a senior public servant, and many officers in the PNG Public Service seem to be under the impression that nothing happened in Papua New Guinea before 1946, when civil administration was re-established in Konedobu, PNG’s mini-Canberra. Indeed, I am surprised that the suggestion has never been put forward that that year should be regarded as the beginning of a new era, and that the years thereafter should be re-numbered, making the present year A.K. (After Konedobu) 26.

In fact the distinguished guest speaker was doubly wrong. There was not only education in pre-war colonial Papua New Guinea, but there was also education in pre-contact Papua New Guinea.

If we regard education as being preparation for adult life, then I think that it may be said that education in Papua New Guinea before the arrival of the white man was more effective in attaining its objective than much of our edu cational effort is now in A.K. 26.

Admittedly, the problem was simpler then, since adult life was substantially the same for all, and it was known with some certainty beforehand what it would be like.

Education in pre-contact Papua New Guinea was in the main on-the-job training.

Children watched their parents in their activities, helped and imitated them, and so acquired the skills they would need in adult life; they also absorbed from them their tribal traditions and beliefs.

But there was perhaps more to it than that.

I believe that parents sometimes deliberately placed their children in situations from which they would learn. They also gave them what we would nowadays call “assignments”. In other words, situational and project methods are not, as some suppose, a 20th century innovation.

They were invented in the Stone Age.

ITie first Protestant missionaries to arrive in Papua came from an England just in process of

establishing a system of universal elementary education based on the “three Rs”, and they probably thought that this was “a good thing”.

But in establishing schools in Papua, as they did at a very early stage (in the Port Moresby area well before the proclamation of the British Pro tectorate in 1884), they had, I think, a more definite aim. Their own Christian belief was firmly based on a study of the Bible, and they believed that if their converts were to become Christians in any real sense of the word they must be able to read the Bible for themselves.

Much of these missionaries’ time was therefore given over to trans lating the Bible, or portions thereof, into the languages of the people among whom they had settled, and also to teaching both adults and children to read what they had translated for them. In the Port Moresby area, the whole of the New Testament had been translated into Motu by the 1890 s, and the children of the first literates were learning to read it.

They were, of course, putting

their literacy to other uses too. Passionate little notes passed to and fro between the girls’ desks and those of the boys; and, although the onward march of civilisation had not yet reached the point at which the provision of public con veniences was deemed necessary, suitable surfaces for the inscription of graffiti were not lacking.

Indeed, there were moments in the 1920 s and 1930 s when I found myself wondering whether I was doing the right thing by teaching my young pupils to read and write at all. This was par ticularly the case when one or other of my former pupils landed in jail due to his ability to sign not only his own name but that of his employer as well.

Be that as it may, up till the time of World

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

War I mission school curricula were confined mainly to vernacular literacy, simple arithmetic, and what was then called “general knowledge”’ later to be rehabilitated under the more glamorous title of “social studies”.

Various practical skills were taught at what might be described as a “handy-man” level, and village crafts were encouraged. In the boarding schools which were maintained on mission district head-stations, pupils spent part of their time growing their own food, building and maintaining their own houses, and otherwise “learning bv doing”. 5 y In the 1920 s a start was made on the teaching of English in those few mission schools in which teachers were available who could teach it. The extent and quality of this effort increased slowly during the 19305, in spite of the handicaps of

inadequate teaching techniques, an almost com

plete absence of suitable reading material, and limited opportunities for the pupils to put their English to use outside the classroom.

In the immediate post-war years it looked as if, under the enlightened leadership of PNG’s first Director of Education, W. C. Groves, the foundations laid before the war might be built upon Then the linguistic cargo cultists took over, and the acquisition of the cargo language, English became the be-all and end-all of primary school ing to such an extent that at one stage over do 118 Papuan teachers were punishing Papuan children for speaking to one another in their own language in their own village street. The school became almost completely divorced from the community.

At long last the tide has turned, and we are getting back to the ideals of Bill Groves and the practice of the best of the pre-war mission schools. Head teachers are being encouraged to re-establish the links between community and school to invite members of the adult community into the schools to teach traditional arts and crafts and to tell stories in the until recently despised vernacular. Who knows, if we go on like this we may eventually get back to encourag ing Pagumean children to read and write their

own language.

In fairness to the linguistic cargo cultists it must be said that they provided what the cus tomers (that i S , pup ii s and parents ) of the late lUs?1 Us ? 508 early 60s were demanding. But during the last few years disenchantment has set in with this cargo cult, as it does eventually with all cargo cults.

Perhaps the chief characteristic of traditional ragumean life was its discontinuity. Such activities as clearing land for new gardens and planting,

tending and harvesting food crops had their times and seasons. Certain kinds of fishing, especially the catching of crayfish, turtles and dugong, were also seasonal. Life was a series of starts and stops; and since traditional education was geared to these activities it also proceeded by starts and stops.

This element of discontinuity was present in traditional religion too. The great feast-dances in honour of the spirits of the dead began with a few tentative, seductive drum taps in the still heat of the early afternoon, and worked slowly up to a climax of non-stop dancing in which dancers sometimes dropped in their tracks from exhaustion and had to be dragged away and revived. Then, following the distribution of the food collected on the sacred platform, the ceremony abruptly ended. The head-dresses and ornaments were stored away for some future celebration and the participants went back to more mundane occu pations.

In place of this start-stop life style we have substituted school attendance five days a week and mattins and evensong on Sundays, year in year out.

We probably can’t admit Melanesian discon tinuity into our offices and factories, but we could perhaps find a place for it in our educational system. One envisages start-stop style courses, each one designed to teach a particular skill (using the word in its broadest sense) at a par ticular level. The length of the course might vary from a few days to a few years, according to the nature and level of the skill taught, but it would have a starting point and a climax. Once the climax was reached it would stop, and the educand would wander off either to chase some further skill or to earn a living with those already acquired. Self-service schooling, in fact. This kind of thing is already being done in some of our vocational centres. It could be extended over a much wider field both subject-wise and age-wise.

Such a system could be operated in the first place alongside the present system of western style schooling. There should be no lack of customers among the 60 per cent, of Papua New Guinea’s juvenile population at present shut out from mainstream schooling.

“This here Progress,” said H. G. Wells’ Tom Smallways, “it keeps on.” So does our present educational system. Perhaps an injection of Melanesian discontinuity would do it good.