Peter B. Dow - Man: A Course of Study records

Man: A Course of Study was a social studies curriculum program designed for upper elementary grades. It attempted to understand human existence from an anthropological perspective. The course was guided by three questions: 1) What makes human beings human? 2) How did they get that way? 3) How can they become more so? The course investigated these questions through a progressive examination of salmon, herring gulls, baboons, and an Inuit tribe, the Netsilik. Recurrent themes of the course included life cycle, learning, parental care, adaptation, aggression, social organization, language, technology, beliefs, and values.

A reformed social science curriculum project was first envisioned by MIT physics professor Jerold Zacharias, founder of Educational Services, Inc. (which became Education Development Center in 1967), in the early 1960s. In 1964, Harvard University psychologist Jerome Bruner took over the ESI’s elementary social studies program and redirected its focus. With the aid of federal funding from the NSF, and after a long process of development, testing, and revision, a final MACOS product emerged in the fall of 1967. By this time, Peter Dow had succeeded Bruner as the director of the elementary social studies program. Dow oversaw the later phases of MACOS’s development and its dissemination. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the course was disseminated through a network of regional centers while the EDC sought a commercial publisher. When the EDC came to a publishing agreement with Curriculum Development Associates in the spring of 1970, the CDA began assisting in the dissemination through the regional centers.

In the 1970s, local opposition to MACOS began to arise across the country, often from politically conservative and/or fundamentalist religious groups. The usual complaint was that MACOS allegedly sought to undermine “American,” or “Christian” values by teaching of alternative ways of life and by covertly teaching the theory of evolution. One such controversy in Phoeniz, AZ caught the attention of Arizona congressman John Conlan, who then took up the fight against MACOS at the federal level. In 1975, congressional hearings on the legality of the funding of the development and dissemination of MACOS by the National Science Foundation resulted in the defunding of the program and massive cut-backs in funding for all curriculum reform efforts.

The combined effects of the cessation of federal funding and the drop in sales due to bad publicity resulting from the controversies brought an end to the development and dissemination of MACOS.