Re: Defining/Describing LO LO3402

jack hirschfeld (jack@his.com)
Tue, 24 Oct 1995 23:03:04 -0400

Replying to LO3282 --

Kent Meyers said:

>To Marion Brady:
>
>You reminded me of a project I worked on in 1974. Through Alvin Toffler,
>we had a task to draft a set of junior-high textbooks on "world cultures".
>The intention was to teach a model quite similar to yours, and use it to
>understand four cultures. Toffler's part of the job was to add the time
>dimension, a synchronic model. A textbook scare arose and the publisher
>cancelled the job. Evidently the publisher or its critics figured that a
>model that allows students to understand a culture on its own terms, and
>find reasons for the way things are, implies relativism, and we can't have
>that in the schools. If foreign cultures are to be dealt with at all, the
>proper method is to decontextualize items, apply our own standards, and
>don't examine the system of standards. That's not what you'd call an
>education in systems thinking or hermeneutics.

Kent, I read your post with great interest. Back in the mid-60s I worked
on several films that were designed to be part of Man: A Course of Study
(MACOS), which was a planned integrated social studies curriculum, grades
1-12. The project was funded by NSF and was managed by Educational
Services, Inc. (now Education Development Center) in Newton MA. The
course being designed intended to teach multiple disciplines - history,
geography, anthropology, sociology, political science, etc. - in new
constellations which would promote an analytical approach and expose the
interdependencies of the "social sciences". After much thought and
discussion, it was agreed to start the first grade with an in-depth study
of Eskimo life. The reasoning was that this approach would permit talking
about a culture which very few of the students were likely to be familiar
with. Indeed, the way of life of the Netsilik had to be re-created for
the cameras from memory by the last generation to have lived in the
culture before its total Westernization. (This process was itself the
subject of a film made for Nova ten years later.)

The films remain one of the most remarkable pieces of ethnography ever
created, but someone told some southern senator about the scenes of
everyday life of this strange people that kids were being subjected to.
Perhaps the sight of an Eskimo child eating a fish eye as a delicacy (it's
like candy to the Netsilik) was the trigger, but we always understood that
there was powerful objection to the implied relativism. Hunting and
fishing with spears was portrayed as cruelty, and several families
sleeping in the same igloo in the winter was portrayed as immoral. The
message that different people have different ways, but that in the most
essential ways we are all human (including the implication of equality)
was all too clear and perhaps too much to bear. The project was shut down
- and with it a huge chunk of other work NSF was funding - by the simple
expedient of gutting the appropriation.

--
Jack Hirschfeld         Whoa! I want to know, how does the song go?
jack@his.com