L'éducation africaine est transmise sous forme d'initiation tandis que l'instruction scolaire de type européen joue plutôt sur la transmission de connaissances livresques. L'une se veut traditionnelle par son ancrage dans le passé et l'autre moderne par sa référence à l'actualité. Du point de vue de leur méthode, les deux ne sont pas comparables. Mais il pourrait paraître évident d'observer leurs interactions en observant les hommes. Au regard du fonctionnement social dans le cas du Bénin, les résultats de l'éducation " tradition-modernité " ont-ils été conformes aux espérances ?

This special issue of the International Review of Education includes contri butions on indigenous knowledge, the cultural context of learning and on the interplay between the so-called "traditional" and "modern" ways of educa tion. It starts from the assumption that cultures are not static, that they are shifting and mutating, and that the Western need to encapsulate "other cultures", which found its most extreme form in their being frozen in time and boxed behind glass in museums of ethnology, has distorted our under standing of the way in which different cultures create, recreate and repro duce knowledge. The basic premise of this position is that there is no such thing as a pure culture, and that all cultures borrow, lend, adapt, and distort distinct elements from other cultures. All cultures, moreover, provide their members with ways of learning about that culture, which include elements such as language, forms of social organisation, and ritual spaces for the trans mission of specialised knowledge. Meaning may be shifted over time, but that in itself is a product of the passage of knowledge through history. Indeed, much meaning is cyclical and reinterpretive so that cultures may look back to a mythological past which they assumed gave them their essential identity but which may be part fact, part fantasy, and part fiction. This is then rein terpreted in the light of changed and changing historical circumstances.

This is a collection of papers on indigenous knowledge, the cultural context of learning and the interplay between traditional and modern education.