Paper short abstract:

I argue that understanding formal schooling's relevance to everyday indigenous life in the Papuan highlands is less important than understanding the pressures that an expectation to navigate conflicting value systems requires of indigenous people who "succeed" in formal education.

Paper long abstract:

The potential irrelevance of formal education to the many Melanesian contexts it is introduced to in the name of international development is now well-established (e.g. Nichol, 2011), and tales of the non-success of education, symbolised for example in the figure of the school-leaver turned raskol in PNG (Maclean, 2004), are also ever-growing. However, this expanding collection of research into schooling for indigenous Melanesians has not yet provided an adequate analysis of what the consequences of success in formal schooling might be for indigenous people. This paper focuses on the expectations, pressures and compromises that lie at the end of a successful formal education. Data from 18 months fieldwork in the rural highlands of Papua, Indonesia with a community which has recently welcomed an active primary school in their midst suggests that children are able to become bi-educated in indigenous knowledge and school knowledge, attaining competence in both. However, the diverse values and concepts these different education systems employ may be setting them up for a future of incompatible expectations, which runs the risk of transforming their "success" into marginalisation. I argue that understanding foreign formal schooling's relevance to everyday indigenous life is less important than understanding the pressures that an expectation to navigate conflicting value systems requires of indigenous people who succeed in formal education.