Education Without Schools: Learning Among the Ponapeans

Colletta, N. J. (January 1975). "Education Without Schools: Learning Among the Ponapeans". Teachers College Record: the Voice of Scholarship in Education. 76 (4): 1–11. doi:10.1177/016146817507600401. ISSN 1467-9620 0161-4681, 1467-9620 .

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Abstract: Northeast of New Guinea and about 8° above the equator lies the highly volcanic island of Ponape (Pohnpei), the crow's nest of the Eastern Caroline Islands. Ethno-graphically, Ponape is part of the greater cultural area known as Micronesia or "tiny islands." But as Mason suggests, the concept of Micronesia as a homogeneous cultural area, bordering Melanesia on the south and Polynesia on the east, loses its utility when confronted with the vast heterogeneity of cultures and languages within its bounds.2

The Ponapeans are predominantly an agrarian people who tend to live on dispersed agricultural plots rather than in consolidated villages or in the district center enclaves, Although government employment and schooling have increased their steady gravitation toward the latter. The physical environment of the island, with its geographic isolation, high rainfall, and fertile coastal plains, has structured the evolution of a subsistence agrarian economy functioning on an extended communal family effort as a means of assuring survival. It is the informal transmission of the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs commensurate to this mode of subsistence that this article shall focus upon.

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OpenAlex: W4210300031
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CorpusID: 142049946