The Saber-Tooth Curriculum
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Professor J. Abner Peddiwell, a historian of education at a small California college, delivers a series of lectures that turn the usual account of schooling on its head. Rather than presenting learning as a steady march of progress, he sets out to show how teaching has long been shaped by habit, fear and the pull of tradition.
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His lectures travel back to the dawn of human life, where early peoples first faced the threats of the wild and began passing on the skills they needed to survive. From there, he follows the way those lessons hardened into a fixed programme, one that continued long after the conditions that created it had disappeared.
Peddiwell's tone is wry and playful throughout, and the story works as both a sharp satire of schools and a fable about how institutions resist change. Readers are left to consider what a more useful education might look like.
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