moment more - eric · the humanizing forces of tool-making, language, social organization, the...

MOMENT MORE

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AUTHOR Bruner, Jerome S.TITLE Man: A Course cf Study. Occasional Paper No.INSTITUTION Educational Services, Inc., Cambridge, Hass.SPONS AGENCY National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C.PUB DATE Jdn 65NOTE 29p.; For related documents, see SO 012 053 and SO

012 076 : Document prepared through the SocialStudies Curriculum Program

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus PostageDESCRIPTORS Childhood; *Curriculum Planning; Elementary

Education; *Human Development; Humanistic Education;Interdisciplinary Approach; Language Development:Social Development: *Social Studies Units; *Teaching;*Themattc Approach

IDENTIFIERS Man A CourSe of Study

ABSTRACTWritten in 19E5, the author describes the initial

stages in the development of the elementary level curriculum, Man: A

Course of Study. The structure and form of the course and threepedagogical techniques are discussed. The course is organized aroundthe humanizing forces of tool-making, language, social organization,the management of man's prolonged childhood, and'man's urge to

plain. Plans for the section en language inClude a considerationabout what communication is, the design features of a language,arbitrariness, acqUisition, and the role of language in shaping humancharacteristics. The tool-making section is designed from aphilosophical approach; the object is to explore how tools kftectedman's evolution. The unit on social organization focuses on thenature of structure in a society, roles filled by people, and theworld vibtr of a society. The childrearing unit centers arcuna threethemes: the extent to which and the manner in which the long human'childhood leads to dominance of stntiment in human life, the humantendency toward mastery of skill for its own sake, and the shaping ofman by the patterning of childhood. The fifth unit concerns itselfwith man's driue to explicate and represent his world throughsymbolic syitems.. The three pedagogical techniqu%s emphasized toachieve the goals of these units are contrastinO, using games, andstimulating self-consciousness about assumptions. The author stateshis plan to create far more units than could possibly fit into aschool year in order to provide the teacher with flexibility in

planning. (KC)

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Occasional Paper No. 3

Man: A Course of Studyby Jerome S. Bruner

The Social Studies Curriculum Program

Educational Services Incorporated

June 1965

miksai,

Introduction"Man: A Course of Study" by Dr. Jerome S. Bruner is the third

in the series of Occasional Papers from the Social Studies Programat Educational Services Incorporated. Like the earlier papers, itwas initially Written for use within the Program. Dr. Bruner lascharge of the Elementary Project of the Sock! Studies Program;his paper served to clarify die direction of work for this Project.We hope that the article will also be useful to persons not directlyconnected with the Social Studies Program, in explaining the aimsand methods of our current efforts in the elementary grades.

Dr. Bruner, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies andProfessor of Psychology, Harvard University, is currently on leavefrom Harvard to be one of the co-directors of the Social StudiesProgram at ESI, together with Professors Elting E. Morison ofMIT and Franklin K. Patterson of Tufts. "Man: A Course ofStudy" has also been incorporated into the ESI 9uarterly Report,

Summer-Fall 1965.

PETER WOLFF

Editorial Director

Man: A Course of Studyby lero;ne S. Bruner

THERE is a dilemma in describing a course of study.One must begin by setting forth the intellectual

substance.of what is to be taught, else there can be nosense of what challenges and shapes the curiosity of thestudent. Yet the moment one succumbs to the tempta-tion to "get across" the iubject, at that moment theingredient of pedagogy is in jeopardy. For it is only ina. trivial sense that one gives a course to "get somethingacross," merely to impart information. There are bettermeans to that end than teaching. Unless the learneralso masters himself, disciplines his taste, deepens hisview of the world, the "something" that is got across ishardly worth the effort of transmission.

The .nore "elementary" iCeourse and the younger itsstudents, the more serious must be its pedagogical aimof forming the intellectual powers of those whom itserves. It is as important to justify a good mathematicscourse by the intellectual discipline it provides or thehonesty it propotes as by the mathematics it transmhs.Indeed, neither can be accomplished without the other.

Wi begin this article with an account of the sub-stance or structure of a course in "social studies" nowin the prucess of construction. A discussion of pedagogyfollows. The aim of the exercise is to write a transi-tional first draft of the course, a congnon focus forthose of us who have been trying to compose thecourse, trying to teach parts of It to children inthe fifth grade. If the exercise is finally successfil, we shallend with a completed coursewith the materials,-guides, films, and the other things that must be in thestudent's hands and on the teacher's shelf. There willbe drafts in between. The exercise, we hope, willallow us to be clearer about what we are doing. In

4 3

Structureof the Course

OCCASIONAL PAPER NO. 3

the final section we shall consider how we propose toget from a first draft such as this to a course that is

ready for teaching.

The content of the course is man: his natun as aspecies, the forces that shaped and continue to shape his

humanity. Three questions recur throughout:What is human about human beings?

How did they get that way?How can they be made more so?

We seek exercises and materials through which otr pupils

can learn wherein man is distinctive in his adaptation to

the world, and wherein there is discernible continuitybetween him and his animal forbears. For man repre-sents that crucial point in evolution where adaptation is

achieved by the vehicle of culture ;Ind only in a minor

way by further changes in his morlihology. Yet there

are chemical tides that run in his blood that are asancient as tile reptiles. We make every effort at theoutset to tell the children where we hope to travel withthem. Yet little of such recounting gets through. It is

much more useful, we have found, to pose the threequestions directly to the children so that their ownviews can be brought into the open and so that they

can establish some points of view of their own.In pursuit of our questions we shall explore five mat-

ters, each closely associated with the ivolution of man

as a species, each defining at once the distinctivenesi of

man and his potentiality for further evolution. The five

great humanizing forces are, of cdurse, tool-making,

language, social organization, the management of man'sprolonged childhood, and man's urge to explain. It hasbeen our first lesson in teaching that no pupil, however

eager, can appreciate the relevance of, say, tool-making

in human evolution without first grasping the funda-

mental concept of a tool of what a language is or a myth

or social organization. These are not obvious matters.So' we ari involved in teaching not only the role of

tools or language in the emergenci of man, but as anecessary precondition for doing so, setting forth the

fundamentals of linguistics or the theory of tools. Anditi as often the case as not that (as in the case of the"theory of tools") we must solve a formidable intellec-

45

17.

MAN: A COURSE OF STUDY

tual problem ourselves in order to be 'able to help Ourpupils do the same.

While one readily singles out those five massive con-tninnors to man's humanization, under no circumstancesCan they be put into airtight compartments. Humankinship is distinFtively different from primate matingpatterns precisely because it is classificatory and restson man's ability to use language. Or, if you will, tool-use enhances the division of labor in a society whichin turn affects kinship. And language itself is moreclearly appreciated by reference to its acquisition in theuniquely human interaction between child and parent.Obviously, the nature 4of man's world view, whetherformulated in myth or in science, depends upon andis constrained by the nature of human language. Sowhile each domain can be treated as a separate setof ideas, as we shall see, success in teaching dependsupon making it possible for children to have a senseof their interaction.

Teaching the essentials of linguistics to children in the Languageelementary grades has limits, but they are wider thanwe had expected. There are certain pedagogic precau-tions to be respected if ten-year-olds are to be capti-vated by the subject. It must not, to begin with, bepresented as a normative subjectas an exercise in howthings should be written or said. It must, moreover, bedisassociated from such traditional "grammar" as thechild has encountered. There is nothing so deadening asto have a handle the "type-and order" problemby "recognizing" one category of words as "nouns"and parroting, upon being asived what he means by anoun, that it is a "person, place, or thihg." It is notthat he is (Atha. "right" or "wrong," but rathat thathe is as smote from the issue as he would be if heattemPtott to aecopt for grief over the assassinationof a President by citing the Constitution on the divi-sion of powers. And finally, the discussion needs toremain close to the nature of language in use, its likelyorigin, and the functions to which it is put.

Whether it is true or not that a ten-year-old has acomplete grannnatical repertory, he is certainly capableof, and delighted in, recognizing all linguistic features


when confronted with instances of them. The chief aidto such recognition is contrastthe opportunity to ob-serve the oppositional features that are so much afeature of human language. What comes hard is toformulate these featuies copceptually; to go beyond

the intuitive grasp of the native speaker to the moreself-conscious understanding of the linguist. It is thistaskgetting children to look at and to ponder thethings they can notice in their language long enoughto understand themthat is most difficult and itshould not be pushed to the point of tedium.

Our section on language includes a consideration ofwhat communication isby contrasting how humansand animals manage to send and receive messages.The early smsions have proved lively and in thecome of them nearly every major issue of linguis-tics is raised and allosVed to go begging. This prelim-inary exercise has the great virtue that it can be re-peated on later occasions, when students have achievedvarying levels a sophistication, with the result that theyreadily recognize how much progress they have made.

The opening session (or sessions, for students often

want to continue the arguments over animals andhumans) usually indicates which among 'several open-ings can be best pursued in later units. The instancewhich follows is influenced by far too little experienceto be considered the general rule, but it is at least one

example.The discussion led naturally to the design features of

a language. We designed a language game based onbee language, requiring the children to find hidden ob-jects by using messages in this bee-like language. Thechildren are encouraged to design similar languages andto improve on the design of the language used. Theytake to this readily and are eager to discuss and makeclearer such design features as semanticity, voice-ear

link, displacement, and cultural transmission. The

game, of course, is a lead into the demonstration of

bee language as presented in the von Frisch film (which

is not altogether satidactory). We were struck, how-ever, at how much more it:iterated the children were

in talking about their own language than in discussingbee language or von Frisch's analysis of it. It is as

6 7


if the bee linguistics were interesting as an introductioninto the closer analysis of their own language.

Our next objective is to present the powerful ideasof arbitrariness, of productivity, and of duality of pat-terning, the latter the exclusive property of humanlanguage. We have approached arbitrariness hy theconventional route of comparing how pictures, dia-grams, charades, and words refer to things. There arenice jokes to be used, as in the example given byHockett of the tiny word whale referring to a big thing,while the large word microorganLOn refers to a tiny one.With respect to productivity, we have had considerehleinitial success with two exercises. The first is with alanguage containing four types (how, what, when,where) with a limited number of tokens of each type(e.g., by band, by weapon, by trap, as tokens of the"how" type) and with a highly constrained set of orderseach referring to a different kind of food-related activity.By this means we readily establish the idea of type andcircler as twn basic ideas. They readily grasp the idea ofsubstitutivity of tokens within a type. (Indeed, giventhe interest in secret codes based on substitution ofwords or letters for code breaking, they need little in-struction on this score.)

Once the ideas of type and order are established,we begin the following amusing exercises to illustrate theinterchangeability of language frames. We present:

1 2 3 4 5 ,

The man ate his lunchA lady wore my hat

This doctor broke a bottleMy son drove our car

and the children are now asked to provide "matching"examples. They can do so readily. They soon discoverthat so long as they pick words in the order I 2 3 4 5,from any place in each column, something "sensible"can be goteven if it is silly or not true Re, "Mydoctor wore a car," or, "A lady fate a bottle," it isat least not "crazy" like, "Man the lunch his ate."

The students need no urging to construct new framesand to insert additional types into frames already set up(like a new first column the tokens ef which include,

8


did, can, has, etc.). Interesting discoveries are madesuch as the relative openness of some positions andthe closed nature of others. We hope to devise methods

to help the children discover some of the deeper fea-tures of grammar, better to gasp what a language isfor example, that one can start with relatively simplesentence frames, "kernel sentences," and transformthem progressively into negatives, queries, and passives,or any two or even three of these, and that more com-plex forms can be returned to simpler forms by apply-ing the transformations in reverse.

Finally, a game has been devised (a game involvingsignalling at sea) to illustrate duality of patterning, thatmost difficult feature of human language. It involvesdeveloping a language initially with a very limited setof building blocks (as with hunmn languages, each ofwhich combines intrinsically meaninglen sound ele-ments, phones, into a unique system that renders theminto meaningful phonemes, a change in one of whichwill alter the meaning of a word so that, in English,rob and lob are different words, but not so in Japanesewhere /r/ and /I/ are allophones of the same phonemejust as plosive /p/ (pin) and non-plosive /p/ (spin)are "the same" for us but not for others). Three kindsof word blocks can be arranged in a frame, makingtwenty-seven possible "words" or lexemes. But theremust be rules as to which combinations mean thingsand which do not. It is very quickly apparent to thechildren that the blocks as such "mean" nothing, but theframes door some do and some do not. We are inprogress of going from this point toward other aspects

Ail duality at this time.It is a natural transition to go from syntax to the

question of bow language is acquired by%young humansand other primates. We shall use the considerable

"resources provided by recent studies of language acciui-sition to show the manner in which syntax emergesfrom certain very elementary forms such as the pivot-plus-open-class and the head-plus-attribute. The ideaof "writing a grammar" for any form of speech en-countered will also be presented. In addition, the child-adult "expadsion-idealization" cycle will be explored asan example of a powerful form of social grouping that

89


is crucial for transmitting the language. For contrast,we hope to examine the problems of language develop-ment of Vicki, a chimpanzee raised by a family alongwith their own child of like age. The subtle problemof "traditional" and "hereditary" transmission is boundto emerge.

Foal ly, and with the benefit of their newly-gainedinsight into the nature of language, we shall return tothe question of the origins of human language and itsrole in shaping human characteristics. We hope first tocover the newly available materials on the universalcharacteristics of all human languagesfirst gettingthe children to make some informed guesses on thesubject. Then we shall consider the role of languagein the organization of the-early human group and theeffectiveness it might add to such group utivities ashunting, given its design features and its universals. Togo from this point to a consideration of myth and itsnature is not a difficult step.

We have examined these matters in some detail here(though not closely enough). Our hope is to givethe reader a concrete sense of how far we wish to go.It is plain that the section on language can take asmuch of a year as one wishes. We are overproduc-ing materials to give us better some idea of what ispossible and how to combine what is possitile. Someschools may want to devote much time to language,and we hope to make it possible for them to doso. But above a, we hope to provide enough varietyso that a teacher can choose an emphasis of his own,whether it be to increase self-consciousness about lan-guage or to impart a Ihelier sense of same distinctivelyhuman aspect of human language. In the first stages ofour work, thE tendency is to concentrate more on "get-ting the subject righr"in this cas linguisticsthanon getting the whole course constructed. And just asthere is a tension between the requirement of the subjectitself and those imposed by the need to teach it tochildren, so is there a necessary tension between theparts of our course (the five topics) and the whole (thenature and evolution of man), We shall return to thismatter in discussing the summer workshop in a latersection.

Tool Making


The section on language has required the collabor.a-tion of a variety of linguists of different stripepure,anthropological, psychologicaland of teachers, psy-chologists, film-makers, artists, and children. At that,it is hardly a quartet done. Gloria Cooper of Harvardhas directed the unit, with the aid of David McNeillof Harvard, Mary Hen le of the New School, JohnMickey of Colorado State, Betsy Dunkman of theNewton Schools, and Florence Jackson of the NewYork City Schools.

One starts with several truths about Is liffilren and"tools." They have usually not used mail); 'of them;and in general, tools will not be of much intertst. Thismay derive from the deeper truth that, in genesal, chil-dren (like their urban parents) think of tools as setpieces that are Pi be bought in hardware stores. Andfinally, childreA in our technol4cally mature societyusually have little notion of the relation between toolsand our way of life. Production takes place in fac-tories where they have never been, its products arcpackaged to disguise the production process thatbrought them into being,

The tool unit is still under discussion. What followsare some of the leading ideas that animate the designof the unit.

We begin with a philosophical approach to the natureof tool-usine What is most characterir .ic of any kind oftool-using is not the tools themselves, but rather theprogram that guides their use. It is in this broader sensethat tools take on their proper meaning as amplifiers ofhuman capacities and implementers of human activity.

Seen as amplifiers, tools can fall into three gen-eral classes amplifiers of sensory capacities, of

motor capacities, and of radocinative capacities. 'Withineach type there are many subspecies. There axesensory amplifiers like microscopes and ear hornsthat are "magnifiers," others, De spirit levels and bobs,that are "reference Markets," etc. Some implementsystelns "stretch out" time (slow motion qinematog.raphy) and others condense it (time-lapse registration).In the realm of motor amplifiers, some tools provide abasis for binding, some for penetrating, some even for

10 Al


steadyingas when one of our pupils dacriDed adraughtsman's compass as a "steadying tool." And, ofcourse, there are the "soft tools" of ratiocination such asmathematics and logic and the "hard tools" they makepossible, ranging from the abacus to the high speeddigital computer and the automaton.

Once we think of tools as imbedded in a program ofuseas implementers of humaa activitythen it be-comes possible to.deal with the basic idea of substi-tutability, an idea as crucial to language as it is to tools.If one cannot find a certain word or phrase, a near-equivalent can be substituted in its place. So too withtools: if a skilled carpenter happens not to havebrought his chisel to the job, he can usually substi-tute something else in its placethe edge of a planeblade, a pocket knife, etc. In short, tools are not fixed,and the "functional fixedness" found by so many psychol-ogists studying problem-solving comes finally becauseso mucb thinking about tools fixes them to conventiona hammer is for nails and nothing but nails.

Our ultimate object in teaching about tools is, asnoted before, not so much to explicate tools and theirsignificance, but to explore how tools affected man'sevolution. The eviden& points very strongly to thecentral part in evolution played by natural selectionfavoring the user of spontaneous pebble tools over thoseproto-hominids who depended upon their formidablejaws and dentition. In time, survival depended increas-ingly on the capacities of the tool-user and tool-makernot only his opposable forefinger and thumb, but thenervous system to go with them. Within a few hundredthousand years after the first primitive tool-using appears,man's brain size more than doubles. Etiolation (or moresimply, survival) favored the larger brained creaturescapable of adapting by the use of tools, and brain size

seems to have been roughly correlated with that capacity.There are many fascinating concomitants to this story.Better weapons meant a shift to carnivorousness. Thisin turn led to leisureor at least less food-gatheringwhich in turn makes possible permanent or semi-

permanent settlement. Throughout, the changes pro-duced lead to changes in way of life, changes in

culture and social organizaticn, changes in what it is

possible to do.4. 2

OCCASIONAL PAPER NO, 3-

All of these [hatters are now superbly documentedin, Leaky's excavations in Olduvai Gorge in East Africa.We have coasulted with him and he- has expressedeagerness to edit four films for us on tool-making and itssubsequent effects on the emergence of a new way oflife. These are sheduled for the fall of 1965. If weare Successful in getting our pupils to speculate aboutthe changes in a society that accompany changes intechnology, we will at least have fulfilled one of theoriginal aims of the Social Studies Program: to get acrossthe idea that a technology requires a counterpart in socialorganization before it can be used effectively by a society.

There happen also to be new materials available onthe burgeoning technology of the Magdalenian periodwhen more decbrative features appear and tool-makersbegin it) specialize. We are exploring this work to seewhether it too can be used in the same spirit.

A few of the exercises being planned to the "toolsection" give some flavor of the pe&gogy. One unitcalls for the taking of a "census of skills"the tasks thatchildren know how to perform, along with some effcntto examine how they were learned (including toolskills). Another unit consists of trying to design an "au-purpose" tool so that the children can have somenodon of the programmatic questions one asks in V

designing a tool and why specialized use has a role.There will also be an opportunity (of which more in

a later section) for the children to compare "tool play"of an Eskimo boy and Danai boy of New Guinea withthe play of immature free-ranging baboons, macaqu'es,and chimpanzees. We are also in process of obtainingfilms on the technique of manufacture of flint imple-ments and hope also to obtain inexpensive enough ma-terials to have our pupils try their hand at flint knappingand other modes qf instrument making, guided possiblyby films on the subject by the distinguished Frencharcheologist, Dr. 'Bordes.

There will be some treatment of teols to make toolsas well as of tools that control various forms ofnatural power. A. possible route into this discussionis an overview of the evolution of tool-making gen-erallyfrom the first "spontaneous" or picked-up' tools,to the shaped ories, to those shaped to a pattern,

123

MAN : A COURSE OF STUDY

to modern conceptiOns pf man-machine relations as in. contemporary systems research. Indeed, if we do-followthis approach we shall also explore the design of, a-. game of tool design involving variables such as cost,

. Oine, gain, specificity of function, and skill required,with the object .of making clear the programmatic natureof tooll- gird the manner in which , tools represent aseltctive extension of human powers.

i..)

The' section on social organization is still in preliminaryplanning, save in one respect Otero work is quite welladvanced. The unit leas-as-its objective to make childrenaware that there cis. a ttruetur in a society and thatthis structUre is not fixed once for all...4 ,is an inte-grated pattern and you cannot change one part of thepattern without other parts of the society changing

, witlk.it. The way a society, arranges itself for carryingout its affairs depend.s.upon a varietz, of factors rangingfromits ecology at one, end to the irreversible course ofits history and w6rld-view at the. otter.

A first taA is to lead children to recognize explicitlycertain basic patterns' in the society around them, pat-terns they know well in an implicit, intuitive way=thedistinction betweeix- kin.rand others, .between 'face-to-facegroups and secondary group% between reference groupsAnd ones that have corpcirate, being. Thtse, we believe,are distinctions that children easily discover. We shouldalso liZe the ctiildren to grasp the rather abstract factthat within modhuman groups beyond the 'immediatefamily, continuity depends not so -much upon specificpeople, hut upon "roles" filled by peopleagain, aswith language and tool-use, there are structures withsubstitutability. . , . :

. Such social organization is marked bk-recifrocity ftdexehange--e, ()operation is compensated by protection,

itrvice by tee, and so on. .There is alwayst giving andening. There arc, moreover, fornis of legitimacy -and

sanction that define the limits of possible behavior inany iven role. They are the_bounds set by a socieqand"do.not depend upon the individual's choice. Law isthe classic case, %-but N:it the -only one.. One cannotcommit theft legally, but then too one cannot ignbre

1 3

SocialOrganization

.1"

OCCASIONAL PAPER SO. 3

friends with impunity and law has nothing to do with it.A society, moreover, has a certain world view, a

iway of defining what is "real," what is "good," what is

"possible." To this mattfr we turn in a later section,mentioning it here only to complete our caialogue ofaspirations of ideas we hope to introduce in this partof the course.

We believe that these matters can be presented tochildren in a fashion that is gripping, close to life, andintellectually honest The pedagogy is scarcely clear,but we are on the track of some interesting ways ofoperating. One difficulty with social organization is its

ubiquity. Contrast may be our best way of savingsocial organization from obviousness=by comparingour own forms of social organization rip those ofbaboon troops, of Eskimo, of Bushmen, of prehistoric

man as inferred (rom excavated living_floors in Europeand East Africa. But beyond this we are now develop-ing a "family" of games designed to bring social organ-ization into the personal consciousness of the children.

The first of these games, "Hunting," is designed tosimulate conditions in an' early human group engagedin hunting and is patterned on the life and ecology ofthe Bushmen of the Kalahari desert. The elements of the-game are Hunters, Prey, Weapons, Habitats, Messages,Predators, and Food. Without going into detail, thegame simulates (in the manner of so-called Pentagon

games used for increasing the sensitivities of generals)

the problem of planning how far one wishes tp go insearch of various kinds of game, how resourcW needto be shared by a group to go beyond "varmint" hunt-

ing to larger game, how differentiation of labor cancome about in weapon-making and weapon-using, howone must decide among different odils in hunting in oneterrain or another. Given the form of the game (forwhich we are principally grateful to Dk CI Abt), itscontent can be readily varied to fit the conditions oflife of other hunting groups, such as the Eskimo, againwith the object of contrast.

What has proved particularly interesting in our earlywork 'with the game is that it permits the grouping of aconsiderable amount of "real" material around itaccounts cif the life of--the Kalahari Bushmen (of which

14

4


there is an extraordinarily rich record on film and inboth literary and monographic form), their myths andut, the "forbiddingly" desert ecology that is their en-vironment. And so too with the Eskimo; should we goahead to construct an anal9gue game for them, weare in possession of an equally rich documentation onthe- Netsilii Eskimo of Pelly Bay. Indeed, one of thedocumentary films made by the ESI Studio in collabora-tion with the Canadian Film Board and Dr. MenBalikci of the University of Montreal (one of seven half-hour films to be "cut" from our 100,000 feet of film)has already received international acclaim.

Finally, and again by contrast, there now exists a vaststore of material on the social organization of higherprimatesa considerable portion of which is also infilm shot by a crew under-Dr. Irven DeVore of Harvardfor ESIthat serves extremely well to provoke discus-sion on what is uniquely human about human socialorganization.

The group now at work on Social Organization con-sists of Edwin Detblefsen of farvard, Richard Mc-Cimn, on leave from the Newlon Schools, and Mrs.Linda Braun of the ESI staff.

This unit has just begun, to take shape at the time of Child Rearingwriting: It is proceeding on three general themes in thehope of clarifying them by reference to particularmaterials in the areas of language, of social organiza-tion, of tool-making, and of childhood generally. Thefim general theme is the fttent to which and themanner in which the long human childhood (assisted asit is by language) leads to the dominance of sentimentin human lite, in contrast to instinctual patterns ofgratification and response found to predominate atlevels' below man. That is to say, affect can now bearoused and controlled by symbolshuman beingshave an attitude about anger rather than just anger ornot anger. The long process of sentiment formationrequires both an extended childhood and access to asymbolized culture through language.. Withipt senti-ment (or values or the "second signal system° or what-ever term one prefers) it is highly unlikely that humansociety or anything like .it would be possible.

15


A second theme is organized around the human(perhaps primate) tendency toward mastely of skill forits own sakethe tendency of the human being, in hislearning of the environment, to go beyond immediateadaptive necessity toward innovation. Recent work onhuman development has underlined this "push towardeffectance," as it has been called. It is present inhuman play, in the increased variability of humanbehavior when things get under control. Just as William

James commented three-quarters of a century ago thathabit was the fiy-wheel of society, we can now say thatthe innovative urge is the accelerator.

The third theme concerns the shaping of the man bythe petterning of childhoodthat while all humans areintrinskally human, the expression of their humanity is

affected by what manner of childhood they have ex-perienced.

The working out of these themes has only begun.One exercise now being tried out is to get children todescribe differences between infancy, childhood, andadulthood for different' speciesusing live specimensbrought to class (in the case of non-human species) orsiblings for humans. For later distribution, of course,the live specimens (and siblings) will be rendered onfilm. Yet the success of a session, say, with a ten-day-old, stud-tailed macaque suggests that the real thingshould be used whenever possible.

Dr. Ba1ikci will be cutting a film on Eskimo child-hood from the Netsilik footage, and comparable filmson baboon and Japanese macaque childhood will also

be in preparation. 'Beyond this there is still little toreport. Dr. Richard Jones of Brandeis is in charge ofthe unit, assisted by Miss Catherine Matz, on leavefrom Germantown Friends School, and Mrs. KathySylva and Mrs. Phyllis Stein of ESI.

World View The fifth_unit in preparation concerns itself with man'sdrive to explicate and represent his world. While itconcerns itself with myth, with art, with primitivelegend, it is only incidentally designed to provide thestories, the images, the religious impulses, and themythic romance of man's being. It would be moreaccurate to describe the unit as "beginning philosophy"

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MAN : A CouRsE OF STUDY

in both senses of at expressionphilosophy at thebeginning and, perhaps, philosophy for young beginners.

Central to the unit is the idea that men everywhere arehumans, however advanced or "primitive" their civil-ization. The difference is not one of more or less thanhuman, but of how particular human societies expresstheir human capacities. A remark by the Frenchanthropologist, 1.6vi-Strauss, puts it well.

Prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences be-tween the so-called primitive mind and scientificthought have resorted to qualitative differences be-tween the working processes of the mind in bothcases, while assuming that the entities which theywere studying remained very nusch the same. If ourinterpretation is correct, )ve are led toward a com-pletely different viewnamely, that the kind of logicin mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modernscience, and that the difference lies, not in the qualityof the intellectual process, but in the nature of thingsto which it is applied. This is well in agreement withthe situation known to prevail in. the field of tech-nology: What makes a steel ax superior to a stoneax is not that the first one is better made than thesecond. They are equally well made, but steel isquite different from stone. In the same way we maybe able to show that the same logical processes oper-ate in myth as in science, and that man has alwaysbeen thinking equally well; the improvement lies,not in the alleged progress of man's mind, but in thediscovery of new areas to which it may apply itsunchanged 'and unchanging powers.

All cultures are created equal. One societysay, thatof Eskimosmay have only a few tools, but they areused in a versatile way. The woman's knife does whatour scissors do, but it also serves to scrape hides, and toclean and thin them. The man's knife is used for killingand skinning animals, carving wood and bone, cuttingsnow for building blocks for the igloo, chopping meatinto bites. Such simple weapons are "the mother oftools," and by specialization a number of tools derivefrom them. What is "lost" in variety of tools is won

8 17

do


in the versatility of uses; in brief, an Eskimo man andwife have tools for all their tasks and can carry mostof these tools about with them at all times.

So too with symbolic systems. The very essence -ofbeing human is in the use of symbols. We do not knowwhat the hierarchy of primacy is between speech, song,

dance, and drawing; but, whichever came first, as soon

as it stood for something else other than the act itself,man was born; as soon as it caught on with another man,culture was born, and as soon as there were two sym-bols, a system was born. A dance, a song, a painting,

and a narrative can all symbolize the same thing. Theydo so differently. One way of searching for the some-ture of a world view is to take animportant narrativeand to see what it ultimateiy tells. A narrative, or atleast a corpus of narratives, may be what philosophyused to be. It may reflect what is believed about thecelestial bodies and their relation to man, it may tellhow man came into being, how social life was founded,

what is believed about death and about life after death,it may codify law and morals. In short, it may giveexpression to the group's basic tenets on astronomy,theology, sociology, law, education, even esthetics.

In studying symbolic systems, we want the students

to understand myths rather than to learn them. We

will give them examples from simple cultures for thesame reason for which the anthropologist travels into

an isolated society. Our hope is tb lead the children to

understand how man goes about explaining his world,making sense of it and that one kind of explanation is

no more human than another.We have selected for our starting point some hunting

societies. An Eskimo society, a Bushman society, an

Australian aboriginal society will certainly suffice toshow what the life experience of hunting peoples is.Frain the scrutiny of the myths of these groups, it isimmediately clear that you can tell a society by thenarratives it keeps. The ecology, the economy, thesocial structure, the tasks of men and women, and the

fears and anxieties are reflected in the stories, and in a

way in which the children can handle them. One good

example of Eskimo narrative or Eskimo poetry, if skill-

fully handled in class, can show the child that the prob-

18

MAN : A COURSE OP STUDY

lems of an Eskimo are like our problems: to cope withhis environment, to cope with his fellow men, and tocope with himself. We hope to show that whereverman lives, he manages not only to survive and to breed,but also to think and to express his thoughts. But wecan also let the children enjoy the particulars of agiven culturethe sense of an alien ecology, the bush,or ice and snow, and a participant understanding foralien styles.

We introduce an origin myth, things taking theirpresent order, the sun shining over the paths of theBushmen, and the Bushmen starting to hunt. But weshould equip thechildren with some possible theories tomake the discussiim profitable, theories not in wards,but in ways of reading and understandinz a myth. Ifthe narrative is to be called a myth, it should portrayconditions radically different from the way things arenow. It is possible to devise ways for children toanalyze a plot. If done with one story variant only,such an analysis may yield something akin to a phrase-structure grammar; if done vrith a group of myths,something comparable to a transformational grammarmay result It is intriguing to see how stories change.Children know such things intuitively and can be helpedto appreciate them more powerfully.

One last thing: why should such thhigs be taught soearly? Why not postpone them until the student canhandle the "theory" itself, not only the examples? Thereis a reason: if such things are new to a twenty-year-old,there is not only a new view to lean, but an oldestablished view to unlearn. We want the children torecognize that man is constantly seeking to bring reasoninto his world, that he does so with a variety of symbolictools, and that he does so with a striking and fullyrational humanity. The unit on world view is under thedirection of Dr. Elli Maranda, aided by Mr. Pierre Mar-ands of Harvard and assisted by Miss Bonnie McLane.

The most persistent problem in social studies is to Pedagogyrescue the phenomena of social life from familiaritywithout, at the same time, making it all seem ."primi-tive" and bizarre. Three techniques are particularlyuseful to us in achieving ibis end. The fast is contrast,

o19

/ tifOr


of which much has already been said. The second isthrough the use of 'lames" that incorporate the' formalproperties of the phenomena for which the game is ananalogue. In th5s sense, a game is like a mathematicalmodelan artificialized but often powerful represent&don of reality. Finally, we use the ancient approach ofstimulating self-consciousness about assumptionsgoing beyond mere admonition to think. We believethere is a learnable strategy for discovering one'sunspoken assumptions.

Before considering each of these, a word is in orderabout a point of vie,y, quite different from ours. Itholds that one should begin teaching social studies bypresenting the familiar world of home, the street, andthe neighborhood. It is a thoroughly commendableideal; its only fault is its failure to recognize how

difficult it is for human beings to see generality inwhat has become familiar. The "friendly postman" isindeed the vicar of federal powers, but to lead thechild to the recognition of such powers requires manydetours into the realm of what constitutes power, federal

or otherwise, and how, for example, constituted powerand willfully exercised force differ. We would ratherfind a way of stirring the curiosity of our children withparticulars whose intrinsic drama and human signifi-cance are planwhether close at hand or at a farremove. If we can evoke a feeling for bringing orderinto what has been studied, the task is well started.

A word first about contrast. We hope to use fourprincipal sources of contrast: man versus higher

primates, man versus prehistoric man, contemporarytechnological man versus "primitive" man, and manversus child. We have been gathering materials relevant

to each of the contrastsfilms, stories, artifacts, read-ings, pictures, and above all, ideas for pointing upcontrasts in the interest of achieving clarity.

Indeed, we often &pa to achieve for our puplls asense of continuity by presenting them first with what

seems Re contrast and letting them live with it longenough to sense that what before seemed differentis, in fact, closely akin to things they understandfrom their own lives. So it is particularly with ourmost extensive collection of material, a film record

20


taken through the full cycle of the year of a family ofNetsilik Eskimo, The ecology and the externals arefull of contrast to daily life in an American or Euro-pean setting. But there is enough material available togo into depth, to work into the year's cycle of a singlefamily so that our pupils can get a sense of the in-tegrity not only of a family, but of a culture. It ischaracteristic of Netsilik Eskimo, for example, thatthey make a few beautifully specialized tools andweapons, such as their fishing lester or spear. But it isalso apparent that each man can make do with thestones he finds around him, that the Eskimo is asuperbly gifted bricoleur. Whenever he needs to dosomething, improvised tools come from nowhere. Afiat stone, a little fish oil, a touch of arctic cotton andhe has a lamp. So while the Eskimo film putsmodern technological man in sharp contrast, it alsoserves perhaps even better, to present the inherent,internal logic of any society. Each society has itsown approach to technology, to the use of intelligence.

Games go a long way toward getting children in-volved in understanding language and social organ-ization; they also introduce, as we have alrezdy noted,the idea of a theory of these phenomena. We do notknow to what extent these games will be successful,but we shall give them a careful tryout. The allegedsuccess of these rather sophisticated games in businessmanagement and military affairs is worth extrapolating!

As for stimulating self-consciousness about thinking,we feel that the best approach is through stimulatingthe art of getting and using informationwhat isinvolved in going beyond the, information given andwhat makes it possible to take such leaps. Crutchfieldhas produced results in this sphere by using nothingmore complicated than a series of comic books inwhich the adventures of a detective, aided by hisnephew and niece, are recounted. The theme is usingclues cleverly. As Children explore the implicationsof clues encountered, their general reasoning abilityincreases, and they formulate more and better hypo-theses. We plan to design materials in which chil-dren have an opportunity to do this sort of thinkingwith questions related to the coursepossibly in con-

1 2 21


rection with prehistoric materials where it will bemost relevant If it turns out to be the case that theclothing that people wore was made from the skins ofthe ibex, what can they "postdict" about the size of ahunting party and how would they look for data? Pro-fessor Leaky informs us that he has some usefulmaterial on this subject.

Children should be at least as self-conscious abouttheir strategies of thought as they are about theirattempts to commit things to memory. So too the"tools" of thoughtwhat is explanation and "cause."One of those tools is languageperhaps the principalone. We shall try to encourage children to have a lookat language in this light.

The most urgent need of all is to give our pupils theexperience of what it is to use a theoretical model, withsome sense of what is involved in being aware that oneis trying out a theory. We shall be using a fair numberof rather sophisticated theoretical notions, in intuitivelyrather than formally stated form, to be sure, but weshould like to give children the experience of usingalternative models. This is perhaps easiest to do in thestudy of language, but it can also be done elsewhere.

We shall, of course, try to encourage students to dis-cover on their own. Children surely need to discovergeneralizations on their own. Yet we want to givethem enough opportunity to do so to r develop adecent competence at it and a proper confidence in theirability to operate on their own. There is also someneed for the children to pause and review in order torecognize the connections within the structure theyhave learnedthe kind of internal discovery that isprobably of highest value. The cultivation of such asense of connectedness is surely the hub of our cur-riculum effort. -

If we are successful, we would hope to achieve fiveideals:

1. To give our pupils respect for and confidence inthe powers of their own mind.

2. To give them respect, moreover, for the powers ofthought concerning the human condition, man's plightand his social life.

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3. To provide them with c se. of workable modelsthat make it simples to analyze the nature of the socialworld in which they live and the condition in whichman finds himself.

4. To impart a sense of respect for the capacitiesand plight of man as a species, for his origins, for hispotential, for his humanity.

5. To leave the student with a sense of the un-finished business a man's evolution.

It is one thing to describe the nature of a course interms of its underlying discipline and its pedagogicalaims, and quite another to render these hopes into aworkable form for real teachers in real classes. Teach-ers are sufficiently constrained by their work loads sothat it would be vain to hope they might read generallyand widely enough in the field to be able to give formto the course in their own terms. The materials to becovered in this particular course, moreover, are sovast in scope as to be forbidding. The materials, inshort, have got to be made usable and attractive notonly to the highly gifted teacher, but to teachers ingeneral, and to teachers who live with the ordinaryfatigue of coping with younger pupils day by day. Theycannot be overburdened with reading, nor can thereading be of such an order as to leave them with afeeling of impotence. At the same time, the materialpresented should be loosely enough woven to permitthe teacher to satisfy his interests in forming a finalproduct to be presented to children.

That much said, we can state what we mean by aunit, the elements of which the course is made. Aunit is a body of materials and exercises that may oc-cupy as much as several days of class time or as littleas half a class period. In short, it can be played to thefull and consume a considerable amount of the coursecontent, or be taken en puissant. Indeed, some unitswill surely be skipped and are intended only for thoseteachers who have a particular interest in a topic or aparticular kind of exercise. There will be more unitsthin can possibly be fitted into a year's course andteachers will be encouraged to put them together in aform that is commodious to their own intent.

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The Formof the Course


In a manner of speaking, a collettion of such unitsconstitutes a course of study. But the image is unfor-tunate, connoting as it does so many beads strungtogether by some principle of succession. It is our hopethat after a certain number of units have been gotthrough, a unit can then be introduced to "recode"what has gone before, to exploit connection. Someunits only review and present no new material.

A unit also sits on the teacher's ready shelf, andconsists of six constituent elements.

I. Talks to teachers. These consist of lively ac-counts of the nature of the unitparticulady the natureof its mystery, what about it impels curiosity andwonder. Our experience in preparing these indicates theimportance of staying close to the great men in thefield, if possible to find a great article that can bepresented in somewhat abridged form. The design ofa language (taken from Hockett) or the nature ofkinship (taken from Radcliffe-Brown) or how a thingshould be caged (Roger Brown)these are examples.The genre needs further study and we are explor-ing the kind of writing requiredsomething that is atonce science and poetry. If it should turn out that astudent finds "talks to teachers" worth reading, somuch the better.

2. Queries and contrasts. In trying out materials tobe taught, we have learned certain ways of getting ideasacross or getting the students to think out matters ontheir own. Often these can be embodied in devicespictures, reading, and diagrams. But sometimes they arebest stated as hints to teachers about questions to useand contrasts to invoke.

"How could you improve the human hand?" turnsout to be a useful question. So, does the question,"What are the different ways something can 'stand for'something else, like a red light 'standing for' stop?"

We have already spoken of our tactical fondness forcontrasts, and we are coming up with useful ones inour designing. One such is to have students contrasta cry of pain with the words, "It hurts." Another isto compare the usu$ words from which phonemes maybe inferredhit, hat, hate, hut, hot, etc. Or the differ-ence to be found in the two allophones of the phoneme

24a

MAN: A CODkSE OF STUDY

/p/ in the words spit and pitthe latter of which willblow out a match held to the lips, the former will not.Yet the two are regarded as the "same letter" or the"same sound" whereas hoi and hut are "different."

3. Devices. This part of the unit contains the"stuff"the material for students. Principal among thedevices is, of course, reading material and we are, likeothers, struggling to get such material prepared. Ingood season we hope to understand this obscure matterbetter. Currently, we are operating, much as others

, have, to find, or cause to be written, material that is in-teresting, informative, and in a decent style.

But there are many devices beyond reading that arein need of developing for different units. One is thefilm loop for use with the Technicolor cartridge pro-jectors that we use increasingly. We are putting to-gether four-minute loops constructed from Eskimo andbalron footage, with the intention of asking questions orposing riddles. Too often, films have a way of pro-ducing passivity. Can we devise ones to do the oppo-site? Why does Last Year at Marienbad abrade thecuriosity so well?

Wc are also exploring what can be done with games,as already noted, and with animation and graphics andmaps. We shall get help where we can find it withinES1 and outside.

4. Model exercises. From time to time in devisinga unit it becomes plain that the problem we face is lessin the subject matter and more in tilt; intellectual habitsof children in ordinary schools. We have commentedon some of these problems alreadythe difficulty manychildren and not a few adults have in distinguishing nec-essary from necessary and sufficient conditions, thetendency of children to be lazy in using information,not exploiting its inferential power to nearly the degreewarranted.

Model exercises are designed to overcome such in-tellectual difficulties. We think they are best keptimbedded in the very materials one is teaching. But itis often helpful to provide the teacher with additionalspecial devices. We intend to use puzzles, conundrums,gamesa kind of pedagogical first-aid kit.

5. Documentaries. These are accounts, or even tape

25


recordings, of ordinary children at work with the ma-terials in the unit. We would like the documentary to beboth exemplary and at the same time typical enough tobe within reach of a teicher in his own work.

Along with the documentary goes a more analyticdescription. The analytic documentary is designed toserve dual purposes. The first is to make it plainerboth to ourselves and to teachers what in fact are thepsychological problems involved in particular kinds ofintellectual mastery that we hcipe to stimulate in chil-dren. In this sense, the analytic documentary is afurther clarification of oqr pedagOgical objectives. Butin another sense, they represent an attempt on our partto accustom teachers to thinking in more general termsabout the intellectual life of children. The second objec-tivecall it educationalis to provide teachers withwhat might be a more useful educational psychologythan the kind that is found conventionally in textbooksdedicated to that obscure subject.

It is our hope Cuat as We proceed in our work therewill be spin-offs in the form of 'general research prob-lems that can be worked on by research centers notdirectly geared to the daily routines of curriculumbuilding and curriculum testing. The work of suchcenters, as well as research in the regular literature onintellectual development, will constitute a continuingfont from which we can draw material for the analyticdocumentaries.

6. Supplementary materials. The final section of theunit "kit" consists of such supplenlentary materials aspaperbacks (and lists of related paperbacks), additionalfilm and game materials, and such other devices asmight attract the attention of either a diligent studentor an aspiring teacher. Without question, it will becomeclearer what is needed by way of supplement once wehvve gone further into providing what will be ourstandard fare.

A final word about the unit materials. We hope toissue them in such a form that each year's experiencecan be addedlo the pievious year's kit. That is to say,we believe that as new experience is gained in teachingthe course, new editions of the kits should be madeavailable to all our teachers. We intend to gather the

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MAN: A COURSE Olr'STUDY

wisdom of tdachers who try out the course so that itmay be Made available later to others, to gather innew materials for teaching, new documentaries, newanalyses of the scholarly literature, ana fresh attemptsthrough our talks to teachers to lend a still more com-pelling mystery to those topics that deserve to be taught.Indeed, it is probably obvious by now that the six-sectioned unit kit, stretched tram one end of the teach-er's shelf to the other, is our proixised substitute forthat normally most unhelpful genre, the teacher'smanual.

No plans for teacher training have yet been established,save that we hope within the next two years to bringtogether for a summer session a group of masterteachers to help advise us about proper steps. Ourstaff now includes several highly gifted and experiencedteachers, all now brooding over this very issue.

The "course," such as it is, will bo "taught" to threeclasses this coming summer (1965 ) at the UnderwoodSchool in Newton. The classes will be fourth, filth, andsixth grades, with the object of discovering at what levelto pitch the material, how to take account of the slowand fast learners, and so on. But teaching is in this casepart of a summer workshop effort to get material written,drawn, readied. It will also pitivide an opportunity todo the kind of intensive interviewing of children to de-termine what they are making of the material and howtheir grip may be strengthened.

In short, the summer ahead is a first effort to do anintensive summer workshop on the course.

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Teacher Training.-Ai

Tryout andShaping

moment more - eric · the humanizing forces of tool-making, language, social organization, the...

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