Introduction

This is a study of the social and psychological aspects of education in a village community in which an interdisciplinary approach has been adopted. For the sociological part which forms the main body of the book, the writer has attempted to utilize many of the conceptual categories and methods usually employed in studies of total culture which aims at creating out of the diverse pieces of human realities ‘a coherent representation of a society, in terms of the general principles of organization and motivation that regulate behaviour in it’. ¹ To achieve this purpose, many of the theoretical assumptions utilized in research in Anthropology and Sociology have been applied, for ‘there can be no valuable empirical observations without the lead of a theory’. ² There is no claim of originality in the theoretical leads of this work, as the writer only attempted to examine ‘how finely some tools given by wiser men might cut’. It is becoming increasingly important in any research to satisfy three main requirements; the first is to make explicit one’s own assumptions that guided the work; the second is to describe the methods and techniques used; and the third is the extent to which one’s ideas and methods have undergone change during the actual work, for research is equally a learning process for the person conducting it. ³