This dissertation describes how and why high school students in a developing country may resist educational processes intended to make them into modern citizens. The research set out to illuminate in-school processes which affected students' academic engagement and to help explicate an eight-year decline on the Grade 10 School Certificate Examination in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea. The report is based on one year of ethnographic research conducted in Pere village on the southeast coast and two high schools in Lorengau, the provincial capital, in 1994-95. I claim that at the time of study a shift away from the village in critical economic resources, rising unemployment, the ongoing viability of the subsistence base, and a need to maintain a degree of control over those living in towns led many Pere Villagers to be discouraged about the value of educational investment and to make claims to a somewhat invented "traditionality." In the high schools in Lorengau, students were aware of the limited opportunity structure after grade 10, and that they could return to their villages after finishing school and make their living from subsistence economics. A critical mass of students rationalized that school success, with its unlikely rewards, was not worth its requirements of hard work and conformity to rules. These students pursued social experience in school, resisted teachers, and valorized an egalitarian village-based identity within the student culture. I argue that the ongoing construction of this identity led these students to conduct routine surveillance of their peers for signs of acting "extra:" Appropriating Western behaviors which were associated with hierarchical status positions in the cash economy, or making strident efforts in school to obtain such a position. Accordingly, I show that Manus high schools functioned as social fields for the negotiation of Melanesian personhood. I conclude that people in Pere and Manus high schools lay claim to a moral "good" inherent in Melanesian egalitarianism, and that these were creative and rational responses which both critiqued the tendency of capitalist development to create hierarchical status differences and served to maintain these peoples' sense of worth in contexts of increasing powerlessness.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-1499 |
| Date | 01 January 1997 |
| Creators | Demerath, Peter Wells |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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