African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 212
EDUCATION: FOLKLORE IN
SCHOOLS
Folklore, in the sense of vernacular cultural practices, is involved in African education in
at least three ways. One is its role in the traditional education or socialization of children,
as elders pass on their knowledge to the next generation. A second is the contradictory
ways in which missionaries and colonial officials conceived of “tradition” and enshrined
their policies not only in colonial administration, but also in school curricula. A third is
the attempt by independent African nations to recuperate tradition in order to create a
national culture; often, these state-sponsored efforts involve schools as a mode of
intervention.
Child Socialization and Traditional Forms of Education
Up until the 1960s and 1970s, scholars of traditional forms of child socialization in
Africa generally saw education as the way African societies reproduced themselves from
generation to generation, autonomous and unchanging, a process disrupted by
colonialism and Westernization. These scholars argued that these educational processes
were primarily informal, situational, and practical in contrast to Western-style schools,
which concentrated on formal and abstract knowledge and served as gateways to jobs in
the colonial administration. Although scholars of socialization stressed the importance of
generational continuity for the reproduction of society and the status of elders in their
theoretical discussions, their ethnographic data pointed to the importance of peer groups
(or age-groups) in the socialization of children and youth.
Within the analytic framework of cultural continuity, these studies gave functional
explanations for folklore, especially children’s games and play, in which creative and
aesthetic practices maintained order and hierarchy, relieved social tension, and expressed
social ideals and values. In play, children prepared for their future roles in society by
imitating adult activities. Songs, dances, proverbs, riddles, and insults all served to
educate children about the ideals and values of a group and to maintain the status quo.
Through artistry, folklore served as an especially memorable and heightened form of
socialization.
Functional explanations for African socialization may also have been prompted by
local notions about the importance of folklore. Some African scholars and promoters of
tradition, espe-cially in anglophone West Africa during the 1960s and 1970s, also
stressed the educative value of local traditions in teaching children social and moral
behavior; however, their functional arguments were primarily used to bolster the
importance of folklore, rather than serving as the basis for a study of child socialization.
In other words, they used some of the same language and concepts as those studying
child socialization in Africa, but for different purposes.
Some formal educational practices, such as crafts apprenticeship and Quranic schools,
have been present in Africa prior to and alongside Western forms of education, but these
have generally not been the subject of much study regarding socialization, because they