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

Dow, Peter B.

Date

10/1/2013

October 1, 2013

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Resource type

en Background/Context

Medium

en Print

Background/context type

en Historical

Open access/free-text available

en No

Language

en

ISBN

978-0-674-33034-4

URL

Official Publisher's Webpage (Harvard University Press)

Frontmatter and Table of Contents (De Gruyter)

Citation

Dow, P. B. (2013). Schoolhouse Politics. In Schoolhouse Politics. Harvard University Press. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/harvard.9780674330344/html

Cited in

The Policy Context of United States Educational Innovation and Improvement

Resource status/form

en Published Text

Scholarship genre

en Historical

Item sets

Oxford Bibliography: The Policy Context of United States Educational Innovation and Improvement

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