Teaching anthropology in secondary schools

Laura P. Appell-Warren, Huffington Post - Cultural anthropology should be part of every student’s secondary school education. Those who study anthropology know that the discipline cultivates resilience, persistence, confidence, openness, creativity, courage, patience, adaptability, perspective taking, empathy and self-control. Studying anthropology at the pivotal secondary school age of accelerated personal and intellectual development, when students are actively seeking to understand their place in the world, equips students to eschew ethnocentric thinking and to better understand and appreciate the beauty in the diversity of human experiences. Anthropology teaches students to take another’s perspective with empathy which contributes to the creation of a more peaceful world — free of hatred based on religious misconceptions and free of judgments based on differing cultural traditions.

Global education, global citizenship, global competence, cross-cultural exchanges, authentic immersion and community service experiences, are major programmatic and curricular themes in schools today. The theoretical base of holistic and systems thinking, provided by the study of anthropology, will positively inform the global cross-cultural student experience....

The anthropological methodology of participant observation also equips students with the tools necessary to successfully navigate cross-cultural experiences. When one participates in another culture one is forced to set aside previously held prejudices and to ask questions; it is through the asking of questions that one comes to a fuller understanding and appreciation of another person’s experience and view of the world...

The increasingly complex nature of our world demands that we teach anthropology in secondary schools. Additionally, the current educational dialogue, as exemplified by Grant Lichtman’s book #EdJourney: A Roadmap to the future of Education, is emphasizing the very same qualities that are cultivated in anthropology. Of fundamental importance is the fact that anthropology is well suited for secondary schools: the content is engaging, the field offers invaluable lenses through which students should view the world, and, anthropology and its lessons can be integrated in many different ways into already existing high school curriculums.

For example, at St. Mark’s School here in Massachusetts the traditional freshman history course, which focuses on globalization, has been infused with anthropological content. Students in that class, in addition to having an understanding of the historical processes of globalization, leave the course with enough anthropological training to view the world through less ethnocentric eyes, and are trained to ask the fundamental questions: “How does this cultural practice fit into the overall context of the culture” and “What can I learn from this different culture?” Finally, as schools become more multicultural and diverse and seek to create environments that are tolerant, it is, as noted anthropologist Ruth Benedict said, “the purpose of anthropology to make the world safe for human difference.”