Schoolhouse Politics

Peter Dow, the MACOS project editor, offers a vivid insider's account of those heady post-Sputnik days of federally funded scholar-led curriculum innovation and of the ensuing controversy that undermined MACOS. In their attempt to close the gap between the "frontier of research" and the ordinary classroom, the MACOS team learned a great deal about the relationship between scholarship and teaching, the nature of the learning process, and what happens in a classroom when conventional textbooks are replaced by primary sources and a wide variety of media. MACOS demonstrated the power of student-directed learning, or alternative strategies for stimulating inquiry, and of nondidactic approaches to instruction. But the experience of designing anddistributing the course also taught these innovators hard lessons about educational politics and the economics of American textbook development and publishing.