Education

The Royal Anthropological Institute’s Education programme has been set up to develop actions and strategies to inform teachers and young people about anthropology as a university subject, and to bring the subject more generally into pre-university education. Anthropology, the study of what it means to be human across different societies, cultures and histories, is not currently taught in schools and colleges in the UK and compared to other social sciences, anthropology undergraduate degrees attract fewer students from widening participation target groups. Yet the discipline of anthropology has a distinctive, and vital, contribution to make to understanding the world today. Anthropology offers a deep understanding of how different societies work, how people live, their beliefs, customs, ideas, prejudices and aspirations. In an era when global understanding and recognition of diverse ways of seeing the world are of critical social, political and economic importance, anthropology has a central role to play in education.