This book reports the results of a five-year longitudinal study of children's early literacy development. The children attended pre-kindergarten in Baltimore public schools at the study's inception and completed third grade at its end. Tracing these children's developing literacy competencies over the years, the study makes an important contribution to understanding how best to facilitate literacy attainment for children of diverse backgrounds.

Schooling in the modern world has a multiple agenda: the promotion of economic progress, the transmission of culture from generation to generation, and the cultivation of children's intellectual and moral development. Originally published in 1993, this book explores the difficulties of achieving a synthesis of these objectives, in a case study of a rural African community. The analysis contrasts the indigenous perspective on child development with the formal educational model of cognitive growth. Teachers in the local primary school are shown to face the challenge of bicultural mediation, and...