A century of Margaret Mead

Born in 1901, influential by 1928, engaged by public issues for the next fi fty years, and a continuing focus of admiration and complaint since her dea th in 1978, Margaret Mead is a display board for the twentieth century. Thi s paper analyzes Mead's contributions and contradictions in her ethnographi es and in her work on learning. Her first published papers critiqued intell igence tests for Italian children in the U.S., and she insisted always that the children of the world could learn a startling range of skills without suffering the pains of contemporary schooling. Mead had little good to say about American education, but she liked to think that we could get it right , and that school could turn out to be a sturdy foundation for trying on Am erican culture.