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Curriculum project.
Extent
Ca. 8 boxes (pamphlets, posters, films, images).
Scope and content
MACOS stands for Man A Course of Study. It is a curriculum project for primary-school level from the late 1960s that was created by the American psychotherapist and educational theorist, Jerome Bruner (1915-2016). Bruner served as advisor to US Army intelligence and US Presidents and continued researching and teaching psychology until the age of 100.
In 1964, Bruner took a leave of absence from his post at Harvard University to work on the MACOS project at the Educational Services Incorporated (ESI), now Educational Development Center (EDC) in America.
Bruner believed it was possible to teach children to be more humane and eliminate racism and ethnocentricism by studying another culture closely. Using the Netsilik Eskimos (the project includes films and images), the curriculum tries to inculcate in children the quest for the following issues:
- What is human about human beings?
- How did they get that way?
- How can they be made more so?
The course used a socio-anthropological approach to collate materials (film and images) about the Netsilik Inuits of Pelly Bay (now the Kugaaruk region of the Arctic coast of Canada, west of Hudson Bay) and their everyday life as well as the natural life surrounding them. The purpose was to teach children about a different race and allow them to equate their understanding of that race with their own - in the hope of eradicating racism and ethnocentricity.
Bruner used his ‘spiral curriculum’ theory as the foundation for MACOS. He was convinced that even young children are able to engage with any material as long as it is presented in an appropriate and motivating way. To him, learning skills was more important than learning facts - including the skills of questioning and debating.
The programme used film in an innovative way and won several awards, including the American Educational Publishers Institute award, an American Film Festival award, two CINE Golden Eagle awards, and an Emmy Award (1971). It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
At its peak in the early 1970s, the MACOS curriculum, which took a year out of the normal curriculum, was taught in 47 states in elementary and middle schools in the U.S. and reached approximately 400,000 students.
History
The collection was donated by Mr. Barry D. Varley-Tipton, a British teacher who used the project in his school, in 2013.
Access
This collection is catalogued and is searchable on Explore. Items from the collection can only be perused in the IOE Reading Room.
