Why Teach Anthropology in High Schools?
Independent high schools are trying to do it all. While preparation standards demand emphasis on core competencies, we craft mission statements that speak of building character and promoting global stewardship. We aspire to diversity of academic content as well as actual population, yet we often find a disconnect between our curricula and our ideals. We attend conferences in search of tips for getting them to merge. How can we connect compassion to mathematics, integrity to English literature, or an appreciation of diversity to the study of ancient civilizations? The answer lays so deep as to be fairly existential: by reconceiving education as a series of lessons in the human experience, and all scholarship as deriving from it. What better science is there than anthropology — the study of humanity — for helping our students to make connections between their studies and their lives? All categories of knowledge are interdependent, having evolved together through necessity as well as in
