Chapter 11: Curriculum and the 1970s Culture Wars: Man: A Course of Study

The recent “culture wars” (Hunter, 1991) in the United States has not been kind to the K–12 curriculum found in our public schools. As Rorty (1999) noted, conservatives have come to dominate what we teach our pre-collegeage children. Conflicts over reading and writing, history, mastery learning, sex and drug education, high stakes testing, and the predetermination and standardization of content have resulted in the near complete demise of progressive pedagogy and curriculum development in our public schools.¹ While many educators wait for the pendulum to swing back towards a more thoughtful and progressive pedagogy, Apple and Whitty (2002) argue that it may have swung too far to ever return. Even with the election of a progressive President who has rejected the conservative foreign, health care, and economic policies of the Bush administration, Obama seems little inter in changing the direction of K–12 education in our society. As Dillon (2009, A1) stated, “We have watched the continued allocation of federal funding to expand the usage of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers (and schools).” No Child Left Behind (NCLB) continues under the Obama administration which significantly threatens a return to more intellectually engaging curriculum and pedagogy in our public schools. We continue to see the trivialization of learning through the “deskilling” of teachers, the push to “cover” (skim) the topics being taught (i.e., the “skipping stone” curriculum), and an over-dependence on rote memorization of facts. Due to the hegemony of conservatism, educational practice over the last three decades (and especially during the last Bush administration), progressive teachers and administrators are now considered an endangered species by some (e.g., Hayes, 2006). A few education professors (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2004; Zeichner, 2009) have fought this extinction of progressive ideals and practices through teacher education and doctoral programs, but their impact on the elementary teaching and curriculum has not been extensive. With the threat of extinction lurking, progressive educators need to protect and reproduce the rich curriculum for which they stand. One way education historians can help these efforts is to revisit examples of progressive curriculum. They can serve as a reminder of the good fruit that is produced when our focus is on student inquiry, intellectual engagement, and depth of knowledge. Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) deserves such a revisiting. In response, this paper will first provide a brief review of the historical context and content of MACOS. Next, we describe the MACOS curriculum, explore the controversies that surrounded the use of this curriculum, and then speculate on what lessons might be learned from this historical event.