ABSTRACT
If the values and aspirations of the different classes in western society are so intimately bound up with children's intellectual development, how much greater must be their effects in non-western ethnic groups ? The trouble is, of course, that societies andtheir values are tremendously varied, and there is no generally accepted taxonomy, though several attempts have been made to distinguish contrasted types. L. Doob, while admitting the uniqueness of each culture, makes a good case for classifying as it were on a unidimensional scale from ‘more’ to ‘less civilised’. From anthropological evidence and from his own testing and interviewing in African countries, in Jamaica and in American Indian reservations, he arrives at a generalised picture of the ‘less civilised’, which includes the following characteristics:
