ABSTRACT
Papua New Guinea was under Australian rule for a much longer period of time than Micronesia has been under American rule. Papua and New Guinea entered the Post World War II years with a people ill prepared, in terms of formal education, for independent statehood. Into the 1960s, education under the various colonial administrations was limited to the primary level and was left in the hands of diverse mission authorities. Virtually all Papua New Guineans with university degrees are quite young. By contrast, the early middle-aged leaders who hold many high positions in government have quite limited formal education. In Papua New Guinean and expatriate thinking about the proper path for the country’s development, much has been made of the “Papua New Guinean” or “Melanesian” way. Papua New Guineans had been confined to minor positions, most of them manual and menial, as “administration servants.”
