NOTE

Still from educational film about the Netsilik Inuit of Canada, a landmark in visual anthropology, part of the experimental curriculum based on the ideas of American educationalist Jerome Bruner. At the centre of the curriculum was an ethnographic film series that portrayed the day-to-day life of Netsilik Inuit of what was then called Pelly Bay, Canada (now Kugaaruk, Nunavut). The Netsilik Film Series had a prominent place in the controversy that would ensue about , and is an important document in its own right. ’s central visionary was the well-known academic psychologist Jerome Bruner. Under his leadership, the curriculum came to be focused on animal and human behavior, and was grounded in the cutting-edge developmental psychology of the period. aimed to develop habits of mind focused on social comity and cohesion through acceptance of individual differences and cultural diversity. would show children that despite whatever our outward differences, we were all part of 'The Family of Man'. Under Bruner’s guidance, the final curriculum began with study of the life cycles of salmon and the social behaviours of herring gulls and baboons, before considering humans, of whom the central example were Netsilik Inuit. The Netsilik Film Series had to bear the weight of addressing a potentially huge range of issues related to human difference. Many of the collaborators were confident the material could adress complex racial and cultural issues. Outrage over the curriculum began in 1970 in Lake City, a small Florida town near the Florida-Georgia border. There, a Baptist minister named Don Glenn, who encountered via his sixth-grade daughter, formed a group called Citizens for Moral Education to examine the curriculum. They soon concluded that promoted “sex education, evolution, a ‘hippie-yippie philosophy,’ gun control, and communism.” Hearings were held at which outraged parents yelled at school board members, who tepidly defended the curriculum, whereupon a bureaucratic decision was made to allow students to opt out of taking the course if they so wished. Soon after, the curriculum was dropped entirely. But this was not before a significant number of teachers, parents, and students in Lake City actively and even defiantly defended the curriculum. One teacher, who was also a Baptist minister, publicly challenged the Reverend Glenn’s accusations that the curriculum was immoral. He and twenty-one of his colleagues also drafted a strongly-worded letter of protest to the school board over the ruling on on the grounds that it violated their academic freedom. Significantly, some of the teachers supported the curriculum precisely because they saw it as addressing a pressing local concern. Like many southern communities in 1970, Lake City was under court order to desegregate its schools, and some educators expressed the hope that the curriculum’s emphasis on the commonality of humanity might play some role in easing racial tensions.