What Running a Research Education Program Across 15 Countries Taught Me About Teaching Anthropology to Young People

Hamaad Mahmood, Monte Vista High School and Las Positas College

I started Atlas Research Institute when I was fourteen. The idea was initially simple: teach high school students how to do real research. Not the kind where you summarize three articles and call it a literature review, but the kind where you develop a question, find sources, build an argument, and produce something worth reading. We’ve since worked with students across 50+ schools in 15 countries.

I am not a professor. I am a high school sophomore taking anthropology courses at a community college. Running Atlas gave me a front row seat to something that I think matters for anyone who teaches anthropology: most young people have never been introduced to the discipline at all.

When students join Atlas, they come in thinking research means Google and a five paragraph essay. Most of them have taken history classes and maybe a psychology elective. Almost none have encountered anthropology. They don’t know what ethnography is. They don’t know that there is a field dedicated to understanding how humans live, eat, believe, organize, and make meaning. The word itself is unfamiliar.

This matters because often the questions that excite my students the most, once they actually start doing research, are anthropological questions. I had one student in Lahore who wanted to study why her grandmother’s remedies were disappearing from her family’s practice. One student in California wanted to understand why his school’s dress code affected different ethnic groups differently. Another wanted to know why food tasted different at her aunt’s house even though she used the same recipe as her mother. These are anthropological questions. None of these students would have called them that, because nobody had ever told them the word for what they were curious about.

I think there’s a gap in how we introduce young people to the social sciences. Sociology, psychology, and economics all have established pipelines into high school curricula. Advanced Placement (AP) courses exist for all three. Anthropology does not have an AP course. It does not have a standardized presence in most high school curricula. As a result, students who would thrive in anthropology often never discover it exists until they stumble into an intro course in college, if they get there at all.

What I’ve seen through Atlas is that when you hand students actual research tools and let them ask the questions they care about, they often naturally gravitate toward anthropological thinking. Students want to understand culture, practice, meaning, and difference. They want to know why people do what they do. They just don’t have the vocabulary or the framework yet.

This is not a criticism of high school education. Teachers work with the curricula they are given. It is my observation that anthropology, more than most disciplines, suffers from an exposure problem. Students cannot pursue what they have never heard of.

I don’t have a clean solution. However, I think anyone who teaches anthropology at the university level should know that most of their incoming students are arriving with zero prior exposure to the discipline. This is not because they weren’t interested, but because nobody introduced them. The students I’ve worked with across 15 countries have convinced me that the curiosity is already there. The question is whether we meet it early enough.