SCIENCE. RESEARCH VND TECHNOLOGY 1970-79 521 



required that before any funds could be released to NSF, comparable 

 House and Senate Science Committees had to be furnished with all 

 curriculum materials for NSF-funded courses, and then both the 

 House and Senate had to adopt affirmative resolutions authorizing the 

 "implementation or marketing" of such courses. Conlan explained 

 that he and other Congressmen had been "inundated with outraged 

 complaints from parents nationwide" about MACOS. He described 

 his amendment as necessary "to stop what is shaping up as an insidious 

 attempt to impose particular school courses and approaches to learning 

 tin local school districts -using the power and financial resources of 

 the Federal Government to set up a network of educator lobbyists to 

 control education throughout America." Summarizing his objections 

 to MACOS, Conlan told the House: 



MACOS materials are full of references to adultery, cannibalism, killing female 

 babies and old people, trial marriage and wife-swapping, violent murder and other 

 abhorrent behavior of the virtually extinct Netsilik Eskimo subculture the children 

 study. Communal living, elimination of the weak and elderly in society, sexual 

 permissiveness and promiscuity, violence and other revolting behavior are recurrent 

 MACOS themes 



Mosher responded: 



This is a course in anthropology, ft is an effort to tell young Americans some- 

 thing of the way other people live in their civilizations. The materials to which the 

 gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Conlan) refers have to do with the customs and the 

 mythology of the Eskimo tribes. There is, in my opinion absolutely nothing in these 

 materials that cannot equally be found similarly in Grimm's Fairy Tales and in 

 Aesop's Fables, scattered throughout the Bible, in the Odyssey, and in manv of the 

 traditional stories that are so familiar to us and in the lives of the pioneer farmers, 

 the basic civilization in which we are rooted. 



Teague defended Conlan's position: 



The gentleman from Arizona, in my opinion, did this Congress a great service 

 in what he has done. 1 argued for his amendment in committee, and I voted for his 

 amendment. * * * f do not consider this censorship at all. Every Member of this 

 House has oversight over everything we pass in this Congress. I do not want my 

 grandsons and daughters seeing the kinds of things that come out of this. 



Symington defended the content of MACOS and challenged the pro- 

 cedure of the Conlan amendment: 



What the amendment does is to make of the Committee on Science and Tech- 

 nology and the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare of the Senate a joint commit- 

 tee on censorship to determine the validity, the usefulness, the propria \ of i in- 

 oculums of educational programs developed by the National S( >unda- 

 tion. * * * There is no more democratic institution in the country than the s 

 board. * * * Hundreds of school boards and hundreds of schools are using this 

 particular program known as MACOS, and we have testimonials, as chick as those 

 of the gentleman from Arizona, on behalf of that program of education as one which 

 does acquaint youngsters with social conditions that arc characteristic of tribal life. 



