The Saber-Tooth Curriculum, Classic Edition

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Editorial reviews

Product Description
The 65th-anniversary edition of an educational classic proves its relevance in examining today's educational quandaries

McGraw-Hill first published The Saber- Tooth Curriculum in 1939, and it has remained a classic bestseller to this date. The book is just as relevant and applicable to the key questions in education today as it was when it was first published.

With tongue firmly in cheek, Peddiwell takes on the contradictions and confusion generated by conflicting philosophies of education, outlining the patterns and progression of education itself, from its origins at the dawn of time to its culmination in a ritualistic, deeply entrenched social institution with rigidly prescribed norms and procedures.

This fascinating exploration is developed within a fanciful framework of fictional lectures, given by Professor J. Abner Peddiwell, doyen in the History of Education at Petaluma State College. In a humorous fable, Peddiwell illustrates the progress of education and give valuable insights into how it could continue to develop in the decades to come.

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2007-11-13 rating:
Does your school teach "fish grabbing with the bare hands"?
If you are in education--on either side of the desk, you will enjoy this old charmer. You will laugh at the longest bar in the world, Tequila Daisies, and all the notions they inspire about how education worked in the VERY old caveman days.

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review by: date: 2006-03-22 rating:
Sunset Of The Saber Tooth
Do you like books where you don't know what's going to happen next? If you do this is for you. The kids Jack and Annie are trying to save Morgen. The kids nearly freeze. They found cave men coats and use them. Will they get eaten up by a saber-tooth? Thios is the best book ever if you read it. If you like adventure then this is for you. This is recommended for 2nd through 5th grade.

by
Josh


review by: ctlpareader date: 2005-07-05 rating:
Still relevant, still unique nearly 70 years later
I doubt THE SABER-TOOTH CURRICULUM would be produced today, a sad commentary on our times. No contemporary publisher would distribute the first edition to educators for the sake of discourse and no doubt a little shrewd marketing like McGraw did in the late 1930s, and no pointed but whimsical and very funny satire on pedagogical history in the age of theory rendered in opaque language would get very far. What is a better commentary on our times is that this wonderful book is still in print and still venerated despite the trouble it would have in getting born now.

A thumbnail sketch: a man, Raymond Wayne, the putative author (actually, the real author is Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin, who died in 1969 and is still admired as an educational thinker), is in a bar in Tijuana, knocking back tequila daisies when he runs into his old professor, J. Abner Peddiwell, Ph.d., who, with considerable help from the daisies, agrees to embark on a seminar illustrating the history and issues of pedagogy. His witty example is told through the story of the cave man who first decided that children needed to learn the essentials of fish-grabbing, little horse clubbing and tiger-scaring. Out of this grows a complex system that includes teacher accreditation, higher education, Ph.D. programs, progressive theory, conservative theory, teacher unions, the rise of phys ed. and the question that never goes away, do we teach children how to think or what to think?

It is enlightening to read how fresh the issues are nearly 70 years later. One only wonders what hay Benjamin would make with the likes of today's educational soup of politics, law, economics and the headlining controversies that plague the profession.

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