BOOK REVIEWS 99

from the U.S.A., and suggests a more "authentic" and decentralised evaluation. Unfortunately, the model advocated does not handle problems of implementation in diverse settings or shortages of organisational and financial resources.

Fhe chapters addressing teacher remuneration suggest ways in which monetary and non-monetary incentive systems can contribute to teacher effectiveness. Zymelman and DeStefano would delink teacher salary schedules from those of other civil servants and make remuneration more sensitive to market forces. Differential pay according to merit, subject, geographical location and other factors is discussed by Murnane, who concludes that this rarely works in practice. Rewarding all the teachers in a school has the advantage of being acceptable to teachers' unions and encouraging co-operative work among teachers. Working conditions are crucial on the nonmonetary side: teaching materials and school-commu- nity links can enhance teachers' prestige. Kemmerer and Thiagarajan provide an interesting discussion of teacher incentive systems in the context of school and community empowerment in educational decision-making.

The concluding chapters, on how organisation, man- agement and training contribute to teacher effectiveness, ate the most innovative and potentially most useful to policy makers. Schaeffer and Avalos focus on pre-service and in-service training to produce better prepared, more reflective professionals, laying out policy alternatives which might be adapted to varying national circumstances. Tais would encourage teachers to innovate, regulate and supervise using individual study, collaborative planning and peer review techniques. These papers make a strong case for more investment in teacher preparation and staff development to encourage commitment and more effective teaching, and provide a cost-effective alternative to highly centralised control and supervision.

Despite the limitations mentioned above, this is a helpful and innovative book. It reviews issues and lays oat policy options, and would be useful for a course ol educational policy and planning issues in developing omntries.

ELIZABETH LEU State University of New York at Buffalo

The Significance of Schooling: Life Journeys in an African Society: Robert Serpell. Cambridge University Press, 19q3, xv + 345 pp., £40. ISBN 0521-39478-3.

This important book is written on a number of levels and dlaws on a variety of disciplines, ranging from psychology through anthropological linguistics to the European history o! childhood and schooling. The work reported has been carried out over a long period and the author draws on a deep knowledge of Zambia. It is difficult to do justice to its richness in a short review.

The study began in 1973-4 with the aim of understand- ing concepts of "intelligence" in a rural Chewa community in Eastern Zambia. Questions were put to adults to encourage them to discuss named children's suitability for a variety of everyday tasks and problems. Serpell shows that the resulting local concepts of "intelligence" differ markedly from those employed by many Western

psychologists. This is partly a function of the tasks presented; comparable differences between folk wisdom and psychologists' concepts exist in the West. However, to summarise a fascinating chapter, the overarching local Chewa concept of nzelu includes both chenjela, translated as "cognitive alacrity", and tumikila, embracing the idea of "social responsibility and co-operativeness'. Chenjela without tumikila is frowned on in local thinking about child-rearing (p. 73) and is sometimes seen as a destructive force. Again, much folk wisdom in the West would echo this. Serpell describes how everyday tasks are used as settings within which adults socialise children to understand these local values.

The next chapter contrasts the local understand- ing of intellectual and moral development with that institutionalised in the social technology of Western schooling exported to Africa. In an overview of several centuries of Western development, including the colonial period, Serpell presents an account of the origins of the age-graded, preparatory primary curriculum offered in the Zambian school. Here, he argues, chinjela is to be cultivated by the curriculum, with the "sense of social responsibility" required for full nzelu becoming the concern of others outside the school. Furthermore, the medium of instruction is English, which these students did not speak on entry to school and which, through its association with privileged elites, is linked with schooling understood as a way out of the community rather than with schooling for local community development.

A related key issue for Serpell, echoing Dore's work, is the "extractive" definition of success embodied in the school's concern with winning some of the few places available in the secondary sector. Considerable ambivalence is expressed by local people about such success, which is seen by some as leading to the loss of individuals to the community. The following chapter explores the challenges set to local teachers by the existence of such different local and official pedagogic cultures.

In a tracer study, families were interviewed in 1980 and the children in both 1983 and 1987-8, as young adults. Tests of early childhood cognitive performance and adult literacy were also undertaken. In analysing the data, the concept of "life-journeys" is used to understand the ways in which individuals made sense of the value of schooling in relation to their changing purposes through time. Among important factors discussed are the students' changing experience of relative success or failure in school and their self-esteem, their gradual involvement in farming and marriage, and the effects of gender differentiation on girls. The result is a fascinating account of the meanings of schooling. A detailed account of a participatory drama undertaken to share the results of the study with local people furthers our understanding of local cultural assumptions.

The book ends with a forceful critique of central plan- ning and what Serpell regards as "pseudo-quantification" by World Bank studies. His overall conclusion is that, for the school to perform an empowering and enlightening function in rural communities, there must be a move away from a curriculum deriving its raison d'etre from the staircase metaphor of schooling, towards one based on a view of social and economic opportunity as a more open-ended venture: "not as qualifications for entry into specific occupational slots, but as resources for creative development on the social and economic

100 BOOK REVIEWS

stage". To achieve this, planners, administrators and trainers will have to

gear the incentive system, the reward system and the disciplinary system of schooling in such a way as to maximise the responsiveness of serving teachers to the needs of the children they teach, of their families and of their local community (p. 268).

Throughout the book, he assumes that, in principle, the local culture and the Western culture carried by the

"bicultural" teachers can be brought together to forge a redefinition of what counts as a "modern education, incorporating the best of both cultures" (p. 278). The theoretical grounds for this assumption, drawing on both hermeneutics and Horton's distinction between primary and secondary theories, are developed in a valuable methodological Appendix on "metaphors for schooling".

BARRY COOPER University of Sussex