Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/331



and the position of the crew, (c) A Samoan girl sitting on a log eating a small live fish which a boy, garlanded and stretched on the ground at her feet, had given her.

Standard directions were given throughout in all cases entirely in Samoan. Many children, unused to such definitely set tasks, although all are accustomed to the use of slate and of pencil and paper, had to be encouraged to start. The ball and field test was the least satisfactory as in over fifty per cent of the cases the children followed an accidental first line and simply completed an elaborate pattern within the circle. When this pattern happened by accident to be either the Inferior or Superior solution, the child's comment usually betrayed the guiding idea as aesthetic rather than as an attempt to solve the problem. The children whom I was led to believe to be most intelligent, subordinated the aesthetic consideration to the solution of the problem, but the less intelligent children were sidetracked by their interest in the design they could make much more easily than are children in our civilisation. In only two cases did I find a rote memory for digits which exceeded six digits; two girls completing seven successfully. The Samoan civilisation puts the slightest of premiums upon rote memory of any sort. On the digit-symbol test they were slow to understand the point of the test and very few learned the combinations before the last line of the test sheet. The picture interpretation test was the most subject to vitiation through a cultural factor; almost all of the children adopted some highly stylized form of comment and then pursued it through one balanced sentence after another: "Beautiful is the boy and beautiful is the girl. Beautiful is the garland of the boy and beautiful is the wreath of the girl," etc. In the two pictures which emphasised human beings no discussion could be commenced until the question of