The Mole of Environmental Factors in theEducation of African PupilsS. F. W. OrbellInstitution of Education, University College of Rhodesia,Salisbury.The soaring costs of education must cause poli-tical leaders in Africa to wonder whether the stateis getting value for money. Why, for instance, isit that pathetically few scientists, agronomists,engineers, technicians and other key figures in amodern state are found among the African popu-lation? The weight of evidence suggests that thereare no significant differences in the level of inheri-ted intelligence between racial groups. Why, then,if the level of innate intelligence is spread over asimilar continuum between races, does one findthis potential being developed to a very differentdegree between races?It seems fitting to use the term potential,implying that such abilities as exist are not fullydeveloped. This introduces the concept of re-tardation, though one should distinguish betweenPrimary Retardation, which is essentially of abiological nature and very difficult to alleviate,and Intellectual and Educational Retardation,which certainly is remediable.As the development of human intellect is essen-tially an assisted growth, it seems right to inferthat environmental factors are the key issues res-ponsible for either retarding or enhancing thisgrowth. The opposite view is the essentiallyromantic one of Rousseau Š that of the noblesavage.Jensen (1967) hypothesises that "environmentinfluences the development of intelligence as athreshold variable". That is to say, once certainkinds of environmental influences are present to aprobably minimal degree, genetic potential willbe realised to a greater or lesser extent. As far aseducational potential ds concerned, surely thesounder view is almost the converse of Jensen'shypothesis in that environmental influences verylargely determine the attainment, intellectually,of the child's genetic potential.The early years of childhood are the vital ones.As Bloom (1964) states, "In general, the findingsreveal the tremendous importance of the first fewyears of life for all that follows. Change in manycharacteristics becomes more and more difficultwith increasing age, and only the most powerfulenvironmental conditions are likely to producesignificant changes at later stages of life." Thesechanges are not merely desirable, they are vital,being antecedent to the development of abilities.An attempt is made to discuss these environ-mental factors under broad headings, giving somethought to ways in which remedial action mightbe taken.NUTRITIONAL FACTORSThe extent to which severe undernutritionaffects the child is debatable. Some, such as Bies-heuvel (1967), Guthrie and Brown (1968) andBrown (1965), postulate that gross undernutritionleaves permanent brain damage even after nutri-tional rehabilitation, a contention which Nelson41(1963) supports by proving the presence of EEGabnormalities in Kwashiorkor patients who havebeen dismissed as fully recovered. Professor Han-sen* has disputed that these abnormalities persistafter recovery. Whatever the answer to this con-tested point might be, it is a fact that 500,000,000children are grossly under weight and under heightfor age. They are now coming to be referred toas nutritional dwarfs who suffer the consequencesof marked undernutrition without showing thetraditional oedema or other bodily changes. Itfollows that these children must experience otherallied effects Š lassitude, passivity, dullness, inat-tention. If one has suffered such undernutritionfrom birth or (probably more common in Africa)from the time of weaning, the consequent effectsmust surely become habitual, thereby presentingto the educationists a problem of considerablemagnitude.From Zambia, Fisher (1968) reported that 70per cent, to 80 per cent, of a sample of urban pri-mary school children suffer from some form ofmalnutrition because many do not even have twodaily meals of porridge and vegetables, orbecause half of them have nothing to eat beforegoing to school or because soft drinks and sweetsare bought in place of nutrients or, more signifi-cantly, because priority is given to adults andvisitors above children. In this vein, it is inter-esting to read the view of Professor H. Isaacs that"Africa is the most inhospitable of the majorcontinents to human existence"; and most Afri-cans, he says, are permanently undernourishedand physically below par or distressed. (Quotedin Time (Atlantic Edition), 23.viii.1968, 20-21).As a depressant to educational potential, thefactor of nutrition becomes all the more relevantin the light of the contention of Wall (1958) thatunless the basic human motives, such as hunger,thirst, fatigue, cold and fear, are continually satis-fied, very little energy is available for learning. Isthe need then to feed before one educateschildren?The fact is that a cycle of poverty and culturaldeprivation exists and the school will have toassume more of the responsibilities of good child-rearing. This is not, strictly speaking, a psycholo-gical or a scientific question but one of socialpolicy which very much concerns the schoolsystem.MOTIVATIONAL FACTORSIt is worth recalling Wall's observations on thebasic human motives and adding a corrtiment onŁProfessor Hansen of the University of Cape Town ina Guest Lecture at U.C.R. in August, 1968.Vernon's (1966) research among CanadianIndians and Eskimoes. He noted that thoughmotivation was excellent in the early years, espe-cially among Indians, there was a lessening ofkeenness as they grew older. Perhaps, he added,"with adolescence they come to realise how littlethe world holds for them and they react to theclash between tribal and Western values withapathy and withdrawal." They become disillu-sioned with the traditional way of life, aspiringto the high living standards of Western culturethough their upbringing has done little or nothingto build up the internal controls of the alien, butdesired, culture.In Africa, certain parallels are seen. In an essayon "Tribalism as the Black Man's Burden", it hasbeen said that, "Over most of Africa, false expec-tations of instant progress have incited unrest andpower drives by rival tribes." Tribalism is seenas "the tenacious loyalty of 140 million Africansto primitive sub-groups that represent certaintyamid bewildering social and economic upheavals. . . and therein lies its strength" (Time (AtlanticEdition), 23.viii.1968, 20-21).In Education, there is a distressingly strongimpeding influence in the very conformity whichfamily and tribal life have fostered. Life in Africais life in "a formal society marked by compulsoryconformity and permeated by a sense of mystery"explains the African author Camara Laye (1954).A similar view has been taken by Gelfand (1959)who said that "the whole training of the Shonatends to encourage him to be the same as every-one else and to stifle ambition. His ideal societymay be described as one of compulsory unifor-mity." To this one might add that it is also com-pulsive.The essay in Time, quoted above, expands onthis point: "Most African tribes talked out prob-lems to the point of group consensus, and chiefsor elders demanded a conformity that madeindividualism as difficult then as it makes dictator-ship easy now. Few bothered about how a decisionshould be carried out. the main goal was tribalequilibrium."This stress on conformity is the very antithesisof individual progress and the African who seekseducation has. as reported by Ashby (1964), topass through "the painful apprenticeship to indi-vidualism". Thus, unrealistic goal aspirations, orfailure to understand the purpose of educationand the near absence of aggressive intellectualindividuality might lead all too easily to a rejec-tion of academic pursuits or, as we paradoxicallyfind in Africa, to a heightened zeal for academic42> 'Łpursuits in the expectation of greater rewardsthan the effort will grant.Nyerere (1967) wisely warns of this impendingdisillusion Š perhaps we have a fine day ofreckoning ahead of us!PERCEPTUAL AND ATTENTIONAJL ABILITIESThere seems to be a ready parallel between theRbodesian scene and that of America where re-search findings reveal that low socio-economic-status children come to school, particularly at themost elementary levels, with less well developedvisual and auditory discrimination abilities.Cynthia Deutsch (1966) explains that the lack ofhousehold objects, of toys and books, must causerestrictions in the visual field. Furthermore, thesechildren tend to live under conditions of a noisybackground and tend to learn at an early age todisregard many auditory stimuli rather than tobe attentive to them. Their very mental healthrequires this negation of normal experientiallearning practice.It is a form of sensory deprivation which "hasnothing to do with the educational quality of thestimuli available, but only with their variety,intensity and patterning" (Bereiter and Engel-mann, 1966). In other words, it is not the quan-tity nor necessarily the quality of the availablestimuli that matters, but their variety and therange of experiences they give rise to. Ferron(1966) points out, from his research in Freetown,that the observed differences between African andWestern children might possibly be due to thefact that the young African child has less experi-ence of even simple shapes like the square, thecircle and the triangle than his Western counter-part. As he grows older, deficiencies may be madeup, but the richness and variety in a Western en-vironment probably again gives the Westernchild an advantage with increasing age. The deficitis cumulative.These themes are repeated again and again.From his West African studies. Schwarz (1963)observes that "having had limited contact withpictorial representation, African children willoften fail to recognize drawings of highly fami-liar objects for what they are." Both Hudson(1960) and Biesheuvel (1967) report similarlyfrom South Africa.One must appreciate that there is a distinctionbetween looking and seeing; perception dependspartly on a selectivity among sensory inputs, andthis selectivity is all too often left underdeveloped.Lawes and Eddy (1966) explain how a wholegeneration of West African Standard 7 childrenaccepted as accurate and reproduced in theirexamination answers, a text-book drawing of ascorpion which, through faulty printing, had oneleg missing, though practically all the childrenmust have seen a number of real scorpions.This re-emphasizes the importance of thenature of the experience the children have. Thus,despite evidence to the contrary, the relativepaucity of intellectually arresting objects is lesscrucial than the inability of parents and of peersto use to good effect what is available. How often,in Africa, is one not appalled at the apparent pas-sivity of parents towards their children? It ishardly surprising, then, that these children revealan inability to sustain attention in the classroom,particularly when structured cognitive demandsare made upon them. In the typical Westernmiddle-class home, activities tend to be mutuallyreinforcing: "attentional behaviour on the partof the child reinforces the parent's interactionwith him and the parent's interaction with thechild further reinforces and shapes the child'sattention" (Jensen, 1967).This, regrettably, is not characteristic of thebulk of African parents as evidenced by Munro(1968) who, reporting on a survey of pre-schoolchildren's environment in a Lusaka suburb ofZambia, contends that little time is available forparent-child interaction, particularly as childrenare usually sent outside when visitors are present,which is frequent. Choice and custom are thedepriving tyrants, and when the child goes toschool he is poorly prepared for the cognitivedemands which the school should make on him.The tragedy is that, if the child cannot meet withsuccessful performance the tasks set by theteacher, he will gradually develop aversion to theschool-learning situation or, worse still, perpetu-ate the stultifying aspects of the docile passivityto which his home life has accustomed him andwhich crowded classrooms and low calibre teach-ing are almost powerless to counter. In Rhodesia,for instance, the Annual Report for 1967 of theMinistry of African Education reveals that 69.86per cent of its African teachers have only PrimaryTeacher Level qualifications. (A two-year teachertraining course for students with a Grade 8 aca-demic qualification). Admittedly, the PrimaryTeacher Level course has now been phased out infavour of something much better but past productscontinue in the teaching service for many years.LINGUISTIC FACTORSProbably the most serious handicapping defi-ciency is in the realm of language, which not onlyserves a social function as a means of interper-sonal communication but is also of crucial impor-43tance as a tool of thought. There is no such thingas a primitive language, for a language is moreor less adequate for the environment which pro-duced it, but it is true that thinking must be rela-tive to the language used. "We do not only thinkby medium of language, but the language we growup in determines what we will think." (Sapir,1956) Perhaps 'how' should replace 'what' inorder that one can appreciate how limiting couldbe the language originally developed by a basicallyrural, pastoral people now striving for educationin a Western technological-type environment.In the multiplicity of theories in the fields ofpsycho-lingudstics, two main theories seem to beof major significance to Africa:1. Whorf (1956) holds that higher levels of think-ing are dependent on language and that thestructure of the language one habitually uses,influences the manner in which one under-stands one's environment.2. The view of Bernstein (1961) is that the child'swhole social environment conditions his lan-guage and his learning. Thus, in his view, thelower working class child has not only tolearn what is to be learned, but also how tolearn and a new language for that purpose.This is important in Rhodesia and in Zambiawhere the medium of instruction is English, andin other African states where a multiplicity ofdialects must give way to a more dominant ver-nacular for instructional purposes.As Jensen (1967) points out, conceptual learn-ing (which includes much of school learning),involves the ability to abstract and to categorisethings in terms of various abstracted qualities.Biesheuvel maintains that Africans are incapableof abstraction Š an extreme view which is stillto be exhaustively tested. However, in researchamong 160 Grade 7 African pupils in the townof Harare, Salisbury, the author found not oneinstance of a pupil's ability to abstract a commonproperty (e.g. roundness) from the followingobjects: a ball of string, a bun and a tennis ball.Another interesting group was that of a plasticknife, a comb and a tea-spoon. Many childrencould explain the grouping on the grounds ofmaterial ("They are all plastic"), a few ongrounds of use ("They are for use in the house.")but never because of their shape.The ability to disassemble what is registered bythe senses into various conceptual attributes is animportant ingredient of the capacity to be edu-cated, and is probably strongly dependent uponverbal behaviour, either covert or overt. In Rho-*Personal letter dated 30 October, 1967.desia, as elsewhere in South and in Central Africa,the indigenous languages are based on a classsystem. As Professor G. Fortune* wrote, "TheShona noun class system segments the world intoa number of classes, a number of which have acommon characteristic or a number of character-istics in common." He then details the elevenmain classes, e.g. class 3 consists of trees and longthings, class 7 of long thin things, class 8 of smallthings. He goes on to explain how an item whichdeparts from the norm "may be indicated as big,small, long, thin, short and squat or big and use-less by use of the appropriate secondary prefixwhich either replaces or is added to the primaryprefix." Thus the categorising of items might tendto be limited to their descriptive or functionalproperties rather than in terms of truly abstractqualities of a higher order of conceptual thought.REMEDIAL ACTIONIn South and Central Africa the normal schoolenvironment is not sufficient to compensate forearly losses because, in their quest for the Westerntechnological type of education, the African childenters the school situation "so poorly prepared toproduce what the school demands that initialfailures are almost inevitable, and the schoolexperience becomes negatively rather than posi-tively reinforced." (Deutsch, 1963)The issue, though, is confused by the fact thatthe children most in need of help live, outsideschool hours, in that very non-supportive impov-erished environment which produced the circum-stances that so depress educational potential. Totake over in the home is out of the question, andto provide intensive out-of-school tuition andexperiential opportunities is beyond even abnor-mal financial and human resources in Africa. Thegap grows as Deutsch (1960) stated in his cumu-lative deficit hypothesis. He saw the problem(1962) with great clarity when he stated it as "oneof the unprepared child coming into the unpre-paring school".A number of lines of remedial action suggestthemselves. First, the functions of the schoolmight be widened and its efficiency thereby im-proved. Thus the school might assume greaterresponsibility than at present for overcoming theproblem of gross undernourishment. Where, forexample, pilot school-feeding schemes have beentried, marked improvement has been reported,even where the nourishment has been limited toan inexpensive protein drink. And since the effi-ciency of schools depends in very large measureon the quality and the attitudes of their teachers,the education of teachers might include training in44the early identification of underachieves and in-culcating in them a keener sense of their role andresponsibilities in attempting to overcome thehandicaps, in their children, arising from an im-poverished environment.In the same way, wise decisions as to the useof such desperately limited financial and humanresources as may exist should result in a signifi-cant reduction in the degree of environmentalhandicap. Emphasis should probably be placedon pre-school projects emphasising the develop-ment of skills in language usage, concept forma-tion and sustained attention. Naturally, research,especially of the longitudinal type, has a vital roleto play.spectre of many minds "never flowering but re-maining trapped for a lifetime in the dark worldof ignorance and lack of opportunity". (Reinhardt,1969) To combat this is of the highest nationalimportance, for no society can face with equani-mity any such darkness in its local world.One might conclude that, after the attainmentof a minimal nutritional standard, the acquisitionof language skills in the medium of instructionis the key. Surely this medium should be a langu-age which is capable of sustaining those high-levelconcepts which have given rise to the modemtechnological age. As Ashby (1964) wisely com-ments, one cannot import the products of suchan age and ignore the philosophy of the culturefrom which the products come. In Central Africa,it seems that the practice of using English as themedium of instruction from Grade I is verysoundly based.If environmental factors do severely impair thedevelopment of inherited Š yet latent Š intellec-tual capacity, our society could well face theREFERENCESASHBY, E. 1964 African Universities and Western Tradition. 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