ABSTRACT

Education has been only one of the many new parameters recently introduced into the Pacific language ecology in the last 100 years.1 Like other developments, its effects on the languages of the area have been largely uncontrolled and the debate as to what contribution education could make goes on unabated. The principal task of education has always been that of promoting certain social and economic developments rather than either preserving or supplanting the languages of an area, although the latter motive has been a powerful one from time to time and place to place.