Schoolhouse Politics tells the story of a unique experiment in curriculum design in the 1960s. In an attempt to teach anthropology to ten-year-olds, Jerome Bruner and his colleagues designed A Course of Study (MACOS), an elementary school course that combined pioneering fieldwork on the social behavior of baboons, a film-based ethnographic study of an Eskimo tribe, and novel and "hands on and " classroom materials. Soon after its debut, MACOS was hailed as an original and exciting way to promote science literacy and to teach young people how to think like social scientists. Teachers and students alike expressed enthusiasm for the dynamic nature of the course, and it achieved nationwide distribution and widespread recognition as one of the outstanding social science curriculum projects of the period. Yet by 1975, MACOS had been driven out from the schools, a casualty of a small but vocal group of conservatives critical of its content and methodology. 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. 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 and distributing the course also taught these innovators hard lessons about educational politics and the economics of American textbook development and publishing.