Schoolhouse Politics
Item
Title
Schoolhouse Politics
Abstract/Description
Schoolhouse Politics tells the story of a unique experiment in curriculum design that was developed in the 1960s and called “Man: A Course of Study” (MACOS). In an attempt to teach anthropology to ten-year-olds, Jerome Bruner and his colleagues designed an elementary school course that combined pioneering fieldwork on the social behavior of baboons, a film-based ethnographic study of an Eskimo tribe, and novel “hands on” classroom materials. Soon after its debut, MACOS was hailed as an original and exciting way to promote science literacy and to teach young people how to think like social scientists. Teachers and students alike expressed enthusiasm for the dynamic nature of the course, and it achieved nationwide distribution and widespread recognition as one of the outstanding social science curriculum projects of the period. Yet by 1975, MACOS had been driven from the schools, a casualty of a small but vocal group of conservatives critical of its content and methodology.
Author/creator
Date
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Resource type
Background/Context
Medium
Print
Background/context type
Historical
Open access/free-text available
No
ISBN
978-0-674-33034-4
URL
Citation
Dow, P. B. (2013). Schoolhouse Politics. In Schoolhouse Politics. Harvard University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.9780674330344/html
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Historical
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