To Open Minds Book

This book does a very good job painting a clear picture of this tension between the traditional ways of the Chagga people and the modern, Western culture that formal secondary schooling has introduced. The social shift that is the most difficult for the people of Mount Kilimanjaro to accept is the way that schooling has challenged the traditional patriarchal gender roles of their society.

This book is a fairly strong ethnography that seems to give a complete and varied look at a complex set of issues. I do wish that the author had spoken more with school-aged boys to gain their insights into the emergence of educated women as an empowered social group. However, I think that her analysis of the culture surrounding school before the description of the school itself put the educational system in context in a way that made it more wholly understandable and useful to the reader.