Michigan, 1955. 205 pp. NPL. While for many years anthropologists were mainly interested in studying primitive man, they are now also applying their concepts to the study of the advanced societies in which they live. Nowhere is this process likely to bear more useful fruit than in the field of education.Education and Anthropology has 10 sections, each consisting of a paper, discussants' comments, and a verbatim report of the subsequent open discussion at a four-day conference of 22 university professors qualified in one or the other of these two fields. They deal with a wide range of topics and are more concerned with school education than with adult education.They explore the nature of the anthropologist's potential contribution to education, but strongly affirm that it is not so much the &dquo;hiring&dquo; of anthropologists for specific tasks that is needed, but that teachers should themselves learn and apply anthro-pological ways of thinking about culture, personality, and values to the classroom and community situations with which they deal.Reading this book, one can realize how valuable an experience this conference was to the highly competent people who attended it, but the book is written in their language and a great deal of it deals with highly abstract conceptions in very technical terms. It is not produced for the ordinary teacher and adult educator. Is it too much to hope that one outcome of this conference may be that shorter and much simpler books on this subject may be written for the rank-and-file layman and laywoman?A good third of the book contains the verbatim record of discussions.I personally found this a prolix and untidy way of presenting the relevant information. Still more irritating to me was the use of Christian names in the records of discussion. We are told that these were left in so that outsiders could get the friendly and informal feel of the conference from the book, but I doubt if this hope will be realized in the absence of those visual and affective elements which make or mar a conference but which cannot be recorded in print.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.