Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

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(wa Thiong'o,1985) that bought the way into the system, securing
individual upward mobility.

2.1.2 Traditional and Colonial Education

Practices and theories of traditional education have been widely studied,
and it is difficult to summarize their central characteristics,
primarily because of their enormous heterogeneity and loose definition.
The social organization of knowledge, Including learning and teaching, has
been radically transformed by industrial society:

Knowledge is now incremental, transformational, and Innovative.
Its structure is formal, relational, and generative. Ko trans-
generat Ional reliability of meanings, but doubt and critique. ...

The basic function of direct experience is replaced by the basic
function of learning, on the basis of vicarious experience, for the
acquisition of higher-order vicarious experience.
(Elderstein,1981:67 and 69).

In predominantly oral cultures, the suggestive power of words is
stronger, and the relation between meaning and referents is enriched by
the frequent use of analogy and allusions (Erny,1981); written texts
acquire and transmit their meaning in the course of social, oral
interaction (Heath,1983; see 2.2). Formal and informal education are
aspects of growing up in all social systems, and although the mix varies
quantitatively from one society to another, formal learning situations are
by no means limited to societies where literacy is more widely spread;
school systems, on the other hand, were established in some countries
before (and continued despite) Vestern school models were imported
(Bray_lClarke and Stephens,1986).

Some aspects of traditional education have been identified and used to
suggest clear-cut differences between traditional education and the
'school' education that developed in Industrial societies and was extended

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