EDUCATION OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE: A Presentation of the Folklore of the Bura Animists, with a Meaningful Experience Curriculum

Fleming H. Revell, 1934. Hardcover. FINE. 316 pp. 12mo, red cloth, black and cream stamped spine and front cover. B/W frontispiece + 9 photo plates. A few small damp splotches to spine, very clean and fresh otherwise with tight binding. First trade edition, based on the author's Columbia University thesis drawing on his experience at the rural Brethren Mission School in Garkida, Nigeria. A classic work in Anthropology. Scarce in trade, it was reprinted by the Negro Universities Press in 1969. OCLC 2519003. 'Mr. Helser's achievement here is unique in two respects. First, he has made a notable addition to the collected folk-lore of Aírica. On this task he has been engaged for over ten years transcribing and interpreting during this time some eight hundred folk stories of the Bura people illustrative of their mental processes and garnered wisdom. Measured by this standard alone, that is, as a collection of original folk-lore, the volume presented here would attract wide interest and attention. This rich collection of folk tales, however, is but the foundation for Mr. Helser's second achievement representing the real contribution of these pages. I refer in this to the 'meaningful experience curriculum' which he has evolved from this background and his own educational philosophy and technique. Nowhere, so far as I know, either in Africa or elsewhere, has a curriculum of this particular type ever been developed by a white man working among people of primitive culture. Some Europeans, it is true, have studied primitive life quite as thoroughly as Mr. Helser, and still others have mastered educational principles and techniques quite as well. But he alone among the world's workers in this field seems to have possessed the unique combination of talents and understanding necessary to make a curriculum of the 'meaningful' type developed here.' - Mabel Carney, from the introduction. [Missions / Colonialism / Africa / Sociology / Folk / Education / Church of the Brethren].