planations in terms of the process, for that is the same |
in both cases. But the social environment is very j o,.. I different and it is to it that we must look for an explana i
[197]
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tion. What is there in Samoa which is absent in America, what is there in America which is absent in Samoa, which will account for this diflFerence?
Such a question has enormous implications and any attempt to answer it will be subject to many possibilities of error. But if we narrow our question to the way in which aspects of Samoan life which irremediably affect the life of the adolescent girl differ from the forces which influence our growing~girls, it is possible to try to answer it.
— The background of these differences is a broad one, with two important componentsj one is due.to characteristics which are Samoan, the other to characteristics which are primitive.
The Samoan background which makes growing up so easy, so simple a matter, is the general casualness of the whole so ciety. For Samoa is a place where no^neplaVs for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends. Disagreements between parent and child are settled by the child's moving across the street, between a man and his village by the man's removal to the next village, between a husband and his wife's seducer by a few fine mats. Neither poverty nor great disasters threaten the people to make them hold their lives dearly and tremble for continued existence. No implacable gods, swift to anger and strong to punish, disturb the even tenor of their days. Wars and cannibalism are long since passed away and now the greatest cause for
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
tears, short of death itself, Is a journey of a relative to ^ another island. No one is hurried along in life or | punished harshly for slowness of development. Instead the gifted, the precocious, are held back, until the slowest among them have caught the pace. And in , personal relations, caring is as slight. Love and hate, jealousy and revenge, sorrow and bereavement, are all i matters of weeks. From the first months of its life, / when the child is handed carelessly from one woman's ! hands to another's, the lesson is learned of not caring for one person greatly, not setting high hopes on any ' one relationship.
And just as we may feel that the Occident penalises those unfortunates who are born into Western civilisation with a taste for meditation and a complete distaste for activity, so we may say that Samoa is kind to those who have learned the lesson of not caring, and hard upon those few individuals who have failed to learn It. Lola and Mala and little Siva, Lola's sister, all were girls with a capacity for emotion greater than their' fellows. And Lola and Mala, passionately desiring [ affection and too violently venting upon the community their disappointment over their lack of It, were both delinquent, unhappy misfits in a society which gave all the rewards to those who took defeat lightly and turned to some other goal with a smile.
In this casual attitude towards life, in this avoid- j ance of conflict, of poignant situations, Samoa contrasts ' strongly not only with America but also with most prlm-
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itive civilisations. And however much we may deplore such an attitude and feel that important personalities and great art are not born in so shallow a society, we must recognise that here is a strong factor in the painless development from childhood to womanhood. For where no one feels very strongly, the adolescent will not be tortured by poignant situations. There are no such disastrous choices as those which confronted young people who felt that the service of God demanded forswearing the world forever, as in the Middle Ages, or cutting off one's finger as a religious offering, as among the Plains Indians. So, high up in our list of explanations we must place the lack of deep feeling which the Samoans have conventionalised until it is the very framework of all their attitudes toward life.
And next there is the most striking way in which all / 'isolated primitive civilisation and many modern ones differ from our own, in the number of choices which are permitted to each individual. Our children grow up to find a world of choices dazzling their unaccustomed eyes. In religion they may be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, Agnostics, Atheists, or even pay no attention at all to religion. This is an unthinkable situation in any primitive society not exposed to foreign influence. There is one set of gods, one accepted religious practice, and if a man does not believe, his only recourse is to believe less than his fellows j he may scofF but there is no new faith to which he may turn. Present-day Manu'a approximates this
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
condition J all are Christians of the same sect. There is no conflict in matters of belief although there is a difference in practice between Church-members and non-Church-members. And it was remarked that in the case of several of the growing girls the need for choice < between these two practices may some day produce a / conflict. But at present the Church makes too slight a bid for young unmarried members to force the adolescent to make any decision.
Similarly, our children are faced with half a dozen standards of morality: a double sex standard for men and women, a single standard for men and women, and groups which advocate that the single standard should be freedom while others argue that the single standard should be absolute monogamy. Trial marriage, companionate marriage, contract marriage—all these possible solutions of a social impasse are paraded before the growing children while the actual conditions in their own communities and the moving pictures and magazines inform them of mass violations of every code, violations which march under no banners of social reform.
The Samoan child faces no such dilemma. Sex is a i natural, pleasurable thing; the freedom with which it j' may be indulged in is limited by just one consideration, [ social status. Chiefs' daughters and chiefs' wives should indulge in no extra-marital experiments. Re- 1^ sponsible adults, heads of households and mothers of families should have too many important matters on
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hand to leave them much time for casual amorous adventures. Every one in the community agrees about the matter, the only dissenters are the missionaries who dissent so vainly that their protests are unimportant. But as soon as a sufficient sentiment gathers about the missionary attitude with its European standard of sex behaviour, the need for choice, the forerunner of conflict, will enter into Samoan society.
Our young people are faced by a series of different groups which believe different things and advocate different practices, and to each of which some trusted friend or relative may belong. So a girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaler, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that woman's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races. Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of woman's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things mediaeval, writes mystical poetry,
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of mediasval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth J he scorns art, believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite of
her daughter's devotion to her will not make any move to enlist her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.
The Samoan girl's choices are far otherwise. Her father is a member of the Church and so is her uncle. Her father lives in a village where there is good fishing, her uncle in a village where there are plenty of cocoanut crabs. Her father Is a good fisherman and in his house there is plenty to eatj her uncle is a talking chief and his frequent presents of bark cloth provide excellent dance dresses. Her paternal grandmother, who lives with her uncle, can teach her many secrets of healing; her maternal grandmother, who lives with her mother, is an expert weaver of fans. The boys in her uncle's
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village are admitted younger into the Aumaga and are not much fun when they come to callj but there are three boys in her own village whom she likes very much. And her great dilemma is whether to live with """'i her father or her uncle, a frank, straightforward prob-l^ { lem which introduces no ethical perplexities, no question ^ of impersonal logic. Nor will her choice be taken as a
personal matter, as the American girPs allegiance to the views of one relative might be interpreted by her other relatives. The Samoans will be sure she chose one residence rather than the other for perfectly good reasons, the food was better, she had a lover in one village, or she had quarrelled with a lover in the other village. In each case she was making concrete choices within one recognised pattern of behaviour. She was never called upon to make choices involving an actual rejection of the standards of her social group, such as the daughter of Puritan parents, who permits indiscriminate caresses, must make in our society.
7^ And not only are our developing children faced by a
series of groups advocating different and mutually exclusive standards, but a more perplexing problem presents itself to them. Because our civilisation is woven of so many diverse strands, the ideas which any one group accepts will be found to contain numerous contradictions. So if the girl has given her allegiance whole-heartedly to some one group and has accepted in good faith their asseverations that they alone are right and all other philosophies of life are Antichrist and '^* [204]
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■4, anathema, her troubles are still not over. While the
less thoughtful receives her worst blows in the discovery that what father thinks is good, grandfather thinks is bad, and that things which are permitted at home are banned at school, the more thoughtful child has subtler difficulties in store for her. If she has philosophically accepted the fact that there are several standards among which she must choose, she may still preserve a childlike faith in the coherence of her chosen philosophy. Beyond the immediate choice which was so puzzling and hard to make, which perhaps involved hurting her parents or alienating her friends, she expects peace. But she has not reckoned with the fact that each of the philosophies with which she is confronted is itself but the half-ripened fruit of compromise. If she accept Christianity, she is immediately confused between the Gospel teachings concerning peace and the value of human life and the Church's whole-hearted acceptance of war. The compromise made seventeen centuries ago between the Roman philosophy of war and domination, and the early Church doctrine of peace and humility, is still present to confuse the modern child. If she accepts the philosophic premises upon which the Declaration of Independence of the United States was founded, she finds herself faced with the necessity of reconciling the belief in the equality of man and our institutional pledges of equality of opportunity with our treatment of the Negro and the Oriental. The diversity of standards in present-day society is so strik-
COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA
ing that the dullest, the most incurious, cannot fail to notice it. And this diversity is so old, so embodied in semi-solutions, in those compromises between different philosophies which we call Christianity, or democracy, or humanitarianism, that it baffles the most intelligent, the most curious, the most analytical.
rSo for the explanation of the lack of poignancy in the choices of growing girls in Samoa, we must look to the temperament of the Samoan civilisation whkh discounts strong feeling. But for the explanation of the lack of conflict we must look principally to the difference between a simple, homogenous primitive ciyUisatioii, a civilisation which changes so slowly that to each generation it appears static, and a motley, diverse, hetero-^ ^eneous modern civilisation.
And in making the comparison there is a third consideration, the lack of neuroses among the Samoans, the great number of neuroses among ourselves. We must examine the factors in the early education of the Samoan children which have fitted them for a normal, un-neurotic development. The findings of the behaviourists and of the psychoanalysts alike lay great emphasis upon the enormous r51e which is played by the environment of the first few years. Children who have been given a bad start are often found to function badly later on when they are faced with important choices. And we know that the more severe the choice, the more conflict j the more poignancy is attached to the demands made upon the individual, the more neuroses will re-
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suit. History, in the form of the last war, provided a stupendous illustration of the great number of maimed and handicapped individuals whose defects showed only under very special and terrible stress. Without the war, there is no reason to believe that many of these shell-shocked individuals might not have gone through life unremarked 3 the bad start, the fears, the complexes, the bad conditionings of early childhood, would never have borne positive enough fruit to attract the attention of society.
The implications of this observatioii are double. Samoa's lack of difficult situations, of conflicting choice, of situations in which fear or pain or anxiety are sharpened to a knife edge will probably account for a large part of the absence of psychological maladjustment. Just as a low-grade moron would not be hopelessly handicapped in Samoa, although he would be a public charge in a large American city, so individuals with slight nervous instability have a much more favourable chance in Samoa than in America. Furthermore the amount of individualisation, the range of variation, is much smaller in Samoa. Within our wider limits of deviation there are inevitably found weak and non-resistant temperaments. And just as our society shows a greater development of personality, so also it shows a larger proportion of individuals who have succumbed before the complicated exactions of modern life.
Nevertheless, it is possible that there are factors in the early environment of the Samoan child which are
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particularly favourable to the establishment of nervous stability. Just as a child from a better home environment in our civilisation may be presumed to have a better chance under all circumstances it is conceivable that the Samoan child is not only handled more gently by its culture but that it is also better equipped for those difficulties which it does meet.
Such an assumption is given force by the fact that little Samoan children pass apparently unharmed through experiences which often have grave effects on individual development in our civilisation. Our life histories ire filled with the later difficulties which can be traced back to some early, highly charged experience with sex or with birth or death. And yet Samoan children are familiarised at an early age and without disaster, with all three. It is very possible that there are aspects of the life of the young child in Samoa which equip it particularly well for passing through life without nervous instability.
With this hypothesis in mind it is worth while to Jl consider in more detail which parts of the young child's ' Social environment are most strikingly different from ours. Most of these centre about the family situation, the environment which impinges earliest and most in-' tensely upon the child's consciousness. The organisation of a Samoan hous
ehold eliminates at one stroke, in almost all cases, many of the special situations which are believed to be productive of undesirable emotional sets. The youngest, the oldest, and the only child,
OUR EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
hardly ever occur because of the large number of children in a household, all of whom receive the same treatment. Few children are weighted down with responsibility, or rendered domineering and overbearing as eldest children so often are, or isolated, condemned to the society of adults and robbed of the socialising effect of contact with other children, as only children so often are. No child is petted and spoiled until its view of its own deserts is hopelessly distorted, as is so often the fate of the youngest child. But in the few cases where Samoan family life does approximate ours, the special attitudes incident to order of birth and to close aifectional ties with the parent tend to develop.
The close relationship between parent and child, j which has such a decisive influence upon so many in our civilisation, that submission to the parent or defiance of = the parent may become the dominating pattern of a life-;; time, is not found in Samoa. Children reared in house-1 holds where there are a half dozen adult women to care for them and dry their tears, and a half dozen adult males, all of whom represent constituted authority, do not distinguish their parents as sharply as our children do. The image of the fostering, loving mother, or the u admirable father, which may serve to determine affec- ' tional choices later in life, is a composite _affair, composed of several aunts, cousins, older sisters and grandmothers j of chief, father, uncles, brothers and cousins. Instead of learning as its first lesson that here is a kind mother whose special and principal care is for its
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Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation Page 17
