Adult Education

Forms of Social Change

Various forms of social change abound. They include changes in institutions, changes in values and attitudes and changes in values and attitudes and changes in personnel. Institutional changes include changes in all more definite structures such as the family, property and legal institutions. At the beginning, the “family” rather than the individual constituted the economic or social unit. The name of assistance, cooperation and economic solidarity among members of the family were usually inculcated into the young quite early in life and these later came to form the main determinants of family relations. As the society develops and becomes wealthier however, individuals are better able to serve and provide for themselves against misfortune. There is greater wealth and income among the various members of the family. Government is better organized and assumes responsibility for helping the destitute.
Education is another institution which has experienced changes tremendously. Education, during the pre-colonial period was geared towards producing a crop of pen publishers to help in the colonial administration. The emphasis therefore was on the liberal arts and classics. Science and technology were little emphasized. Today, the situation is reversed; science and technology now occupy the central position in educational planning and development in the country as reflected in the number of “technical” colleges and courses and also in the scholarship policies of the Federal and State Governments.

Again, there have been enormous changes in the institutions of government through the years. In some traditional African systems, legal and political power emanated from the king, who acted, as it were, under divine inspiration. The king’s authority depended on the supernatural sanctions attached to his hereditary status. He was believed to stand in a special relationship to the supernatural which controlled the lives of people. He alone therefore, could perform such magical functions that would, say, increase the fertility of the soil or bring fortune and/ or misfortune to his subjects. Even in economic matters the king’s authority was supreme. For example, a subject’s right to occupy land, and hence his entire livelihood, depended on the king. The king’s authority in the earliest forms of government was therefore, in theory, absolute.

The advent of the colonial masters and the resultant colonial powers significantly altered both the nature and the basics of the king’s authority. Where indirect rule was introduced, kings (or obas and chiefs) became, in most cases, more apron strings in the colonial administration. The most important function of the supreme authority of the king, the organization of war, the organization of war, was removed from him. Even where he retained his judicial authority, the king, under the colonial situation, lost the right to inflict severe punishments for offences against himself. Where new systems of land tenure had been introduced, the fundamental economic relationship between the king (or oba) and his people was broken. Even his religious (or magical) authority was now eroded by the coming of islam and Christianity.

Changes in values and attitudes are another form of social change. All societies have values; that is, conceptions or standards by which things are compared and approved or disapproved. But these values, like all social structures, change from time to time. For example, the image of the woman is no longer simply one of a wife and mother and her sacred duty too serve man; society no longer frowns on girls working while waiting to get married; the working girl is no longer associated with promiscuity and education of women no longer considered unimportant. The attitudes towards work, marriage and family are also changing.

Another form of social change is change in personnel. Changes can occur in the particular persons occupying positions in a social system. There was a time when the senior academic and administrative staff of the University of Ibadan for example, was made up mostly of expatriates in the senior staff is Nigerian. The same applies to the ministries. Many companies were in the past owned by expatriates but now, with the indigenization decree (laws), most companies are now owned by Nigerians