Anthropology for Youngsters

People are always making positive statements to children about race. Why not tell them the facts as far as science has discovered them? I start right in telling them that what looks like inferiority turns out to be mere difference. Biologically there is no superiority or inferiority; the largest brain known to science is the brain of an idiot. Man is the only animal that blushes and the only one that needs to, for we [alone] persecute each other for differences.

This statement is by a powerhouse of a woman teacher who is about to take anthropology into the high school. The powerhouse is Ethel Josephine Alpenfels, who has found that adults as well as high-school students will eat up scientific information about race and culture when presented by a breezy blonde with the energy of a Brunhild and a far better disposition. The scene of her pioneering will be Chicago.

Miss Alpenfels has spent much of 1944 barnstorming the Midwest, chiefly for Dr. Stewart Grant Cole's Bureau for Intercultural Education, which provides source material and teaching ideas to school systems anxious to teach something about U.S. cultural diversities, minimize bias, increase mutual tolerance.

She talks to the children about various groups they know -- Mexicans, Filipinos, Negroes--describes their backgrounds, shows that primitiveness does not mean stupidity, that "simple" peoples have complex cultures. She also tells them about physical anthropology, teaches them that race is not the same as religion or nationality.

Next term Miss Alpenfels will teach 600 sophomores in three Chicago high schools. She is planning a textbook for the course. A University of Chicago attitude test will be given before and after the course, and a final one a year later. Results will be compared with tests given to students whose curriculum is the same except for anthropology. If the results seem successful, the course may be made general in Chicago schools.

Vigorous Ethel Alpenfels, 30, is the Denver-born daughter of a German baron, a schoolmate of the late great Marshal von" Hindenburg. She took her A.B. at the University of Washington, is now studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She has been a volunteer social worker in Judge Ben Lindsey's once-famed Denver juvenile court, a schoolteacher and Y.W.C.A. camp worker. At the University of Washington she took anthropology as a snap course to make up lost credits, found herself a career.

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