Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EDUCATION IN THE MORE COMPLEX FOLKWAYS OP THE ORIENTAL WORLD We have called the general organization of society in the primitive world by the general name of the Folkways, and we have seen how these folkway customs and traditions control the education of the young among primitive groups. We must now see that in general, in all these very primitive groups, these customs and traditions are all unwritten, unrecorded; they live in the memories of the elders, in the rituals and ceremonials of the group, in the suggestion of sacred objects, and in the habits of the age. Written language has not yet arisen. Hence all these traditions are subject to the imperceptible changes that surely occur in even the most rigid world, variations which come about in the process of transmission from one generation to the next. Primitive men pride themselves upon the exactness of their memories, but usually they have no means of checking up their recitals, save by the memory of some other individual. More serious variations will occur through changes in the meanings of words that come because of modifications in the conditions of living. Of course these changes are usually unnoticed, and a suggestion that they were occurring would be resented by all loyal members of the group. Now these changes lead in two possible directions. The one, which though exceedingly interesting must not detain us here, leads toward a more narrowly physical and accordingly a more narrowly social existence, as the conditions of living become more and more precarious for any particular group. Group degeneration is not an unknown phenomenon. But our path leads elsewhere. The Rise to the So-called Oriental Level of Culture.— The other direction which may result from these unconscious changes in the primitive...