Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/252

 The strict segregation of related boys and girls, the institutionalised hostility between pre-adolescent children of opposite sexes in Samoa are cultural features with which we are completely out of sympathy. For the vestiges of such attitudes, expressed in our one-sex schools, we are trying to substitute coeducation, to habituate one sex to another sufficiently so that difference of sex will be lost sight of in the more important and more striking differences in personality. There are no recognisable gains in the Samoan system of taboo and segregation, of response to a group rather than response to an individual. But when we contrast the other factor of difference the conclusion is not so sure. What are the rewards of the tiny, ingrown, biological family opposing its closed circle of affection to a forbidding world, of the strong ties between parents and children, ties which imply an active personal relation from birth until death? Specialisation of affection, it is true, but at the price of many individuals' preserving through life the attitudes of dependent children, of ties between parents and children which successfully defeat the children's attempts to make other adjustments, of necessary choices made unnecessarily poignant because they become issues in an intense emotional relationship. Perhaps these are too heavy prices to pay for a specialisation of emotion which might be brought about in other ways, notably through coeducation. And with such a question in our minds it is interesting to note that a larger family community, in which there