Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era

By Peter Dow

Schoolhouse Politics tells the story of an 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 fieldwork on the social behaviour of baboons, a film-based enthnographic study of an Eskimo tribe, and hands-on classroom materials. 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 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674792408
• ISBN13: 9780674792401
• Release Date: September 1991
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.