One Kind of Human Being

Abstract

Contemporary reform movements have roots in post-World War II changes. Back then, social reformers in the United States targeted education as a field for the human sciences to intervene and impart a new kind of knowledge into daily life. These experts developed Man: A Course of Study (MACOS), a science-based curriculum, steeped in biological and cultural anthropology, to teach relationships by "Making Up People" to administer a new way of life. To understand how, a framework of governmentality helps investigate and explore how the underlying constructs of structures, functions, and social systems within MACOS cohered on a field of intelligibility to produce a cultural thesis of how schoolchildren should be.