The MacMillan Institute humanities curriculum may be licensed by primary and secondary educators formally engaged in The MacMillan Institute’s Academy or School educational models.
The curriculum is modeled on a highly successful History/English curricula from a private school that helped its graduates succeed in some of the most rigorous academic programs in American colleges and universities.
Since 2018, MacMillan Institute humanities curricula have been providing public school students with the same rigorous, academic experience.
MacMillan Institute humanities curricula are based on Drs. Louise and Donald Cowan’s vision of the “spirit of liberal learning for all,” a conviction the Cowans shared that every child in every school deserved and needed the solid foundation of a high quality liberal education with the proper study of “poetry”—great works of imaginative literature—at its core.
MacMillan Institute educators are taught to guide students through curricula that is designed to help students confront and explore the complexities—both the good and the bad—of the human situation. As such, students are taught both intellectual rigor and compassion for humankind, an elevating and humanizing community-building intellectual experience.
Our Test Results
Comprehensive student involvement in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula at I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA*, FWISD
*Although a magnet school, I.M. Terrell represents the Fort Worth ISD demographically, and its entrance requirements are very generous for students who struggle academically.
9th Grade 2021 STAAR—first year enrolled in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula
English I — 66% meets, 17% mastery FWISD — 28% meets, 4% mastery
10th Grade 2021 STAAR—second year enrolled in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula
English II — 63% meets, 20% mastery FWISD — 34% meets, 4% mastery
11th Grade 2021 STAAR—third year enrolled in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula
U.S. History — 72% mastery FWISD — 29% mastery 2021
STATE AVERAGE — 43% MASTERY
Comprehensive student involvement in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula in four schools at Townview Magnet Center with representative demographics of the Dallas ISD and flexible entrance requirements
9th Grade 2018 and 2019 STAAR—first year in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula, School of Business
English I — from 9% to 30% mastery
9th Grade 2018 and 2019 STAAR—first year in MacMillan Institute humanities curricula, School of Health
English I — from 15% to 38% mastery
Representative readings in Upper School MacMillan Institute Humanities Curricula follow:
6th Grade — World Myths™
A world history and world geography course designed to awaken the soul to wonder and teach foundational skills and knowledge
Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth ǀ Ann Burg’s Serafina’s Promise
Gabriel García Márquez’ “Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
and “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” ǀ Pam Muñoz Ryan’s The Dreamer
Lamb’s Shakespeare’s The Tempest ǀ Aesop’s Fables ǀ Homer’s Odyssey, Books I-IV
Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” ǀ from Octavio Paz’ “The Day of the Dead”
from Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl ǀ Chinua Achebe’s “Chilke’s School Days”
from The West African Mwindo Epic ǀ Eugene Yelchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose
from The Epic of Gilgamesh ǀ from Genesis and Exodus ǀ from the Qur’an
Shashi Deshpande’s The Narayanpur Incident ǀ Laurence Yep’s Dragon’s Gate
Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again ǀ from D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
Jean Fritz’s Around the World in 100 Years ǀ Virginia Hamilton’s In the Beginning
from The Book of the Hopi ǀ from Zitkala-Sa’s Old Indian Legends
from Roger Abrahams’ African Folktales ǀ Lyric poems from authors around the world
7th Grade — Texas Myths™
A Texas History course designed to examine and confront the epic qualities and ambitions—for good and ill—that distinguish Texas and her spirit in the world
Virgil’s Aeneid ǀ from Jane Archer’s Texas Indian Myths and Legends ǀ from Americo Paredes’ A Texas-Mexico Cancionero
from J. Frank Dobie’s Tales of Old-Time Texas ǀ Ann Rinaldi’s Come Juneteenth ǀ from Juan Seguin’s memoir
Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller ǀ Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas ǀ from Noche Buena
Shakespeare’s The Tempest ǀ Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate ǀ from Olga Torres’ Recollections of My Trip
From John Graves’ Goodbye to a River ǀ the story of Francita Alaver, the “Angel of Goliad”
From Americo Paredes’ With a Pistol in His Hand ǀ from Norma Cantu’s Caniculas
From Tomas Rivera’s And the Earth Did Not Devour Him ǀ Lyric poetry from Texas poets and beyond
8th Grade — American Myths™
A thoughtful exploration of the complexities of the American stories and American voices from 1607 to Reconstruction
Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound ǀ Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail
from Herodotus’ Histories ǀ from Thucydides’ Funeral Oration of Pericles
from Aeschylus’ Oresteia ǀ Homer’s Odyssey, Books 21-24 ǀ from Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis
from John Smith’s “The General History” ǀ The Mayflower Compact ǀ from Paine’s Common Sense
Phillis Wheatley’s “Letter to George Washington” ǀ Speeches from the Conventions
from the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence ǀ from The Federalist Papers
The Constitution of the United States ǀ from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography
from Olauduh Equiano’s “Interesting Narrative” ǀ from George Washington’s “Farewell Address”
Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle ǀ Scott O’Dell’s Streams to the River, River to the Sea
from Jonathan Edwards’ sermons ǀ Native American stories, speeches and lyric poetry
from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America ǀ from Thoreau’s On Waldon Pond, “Civil Disobedience”
from Emerson’s “American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance” ǀ short stories from Mark Twain
Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and “The Raven” ǀ Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown
Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener ǀ from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
from Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ǀ from Charlotte Forten Grimké’s Journals
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and “Second Inaugural” ǀ Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Lyric Poetry from Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper,
William Cullen Bryant, Emily Dickinson, James Whitfield, Melville,
Walt Whitman, Robert Hayden
9th Grade — The Heroic Approach to Life™
Shaped around the theme of the impulse in emerging civilizations, this course helps develop a universal, global understanding of the human situation through a study of the world history, literature, art, and philosophy from ancient times to the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
The Epic of Gilgamesh ǀ from The Code of Hammurabi
from Genesis, Exodus, The 10 Commandments, Psalms ǀ The Ramayana
from Confucius’ Analects ǀ from Laozi’s The Way of the Dao ǀ Hesiod’s Theogony
Homer’s Odyssey ǀ Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Oresteia ǀ Aristophanes’ Peace, Frogs
Plato’s Apology, Crito, from The Republic ǀ from Herodotus’ Histories
from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War ǀ from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ǀ from I Maccabees ǀ from Cicero’s speeches
from The Gospel of Luke, Acts ǀ “The Beatitudes” ǀ from Augustine’s Confessions
Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy ǀ from the Qur’an ǀ from 1001 Arabian Nights
The West African Mwindo Epic ǀ Beowulf ǀ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
from the Magna Carta, Code of Justinian, Shotoku’s Constitution, Tang Code of China
Dante’s Divine Comedy ǀ from Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s Sonnets
from The Canterbury Tales ǀ Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly ǀ More’s Utopia
from Luther’s 95 Theses ǀ from Machiavelli’s The Prince
10th Grade — Humanity and the City in Modernity™
A careful exploration of the roots and modes of modernity that rise out of the ancient worlds and find new yet familiar sources of expression in the human enterprise
Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Volumes I and II ǀ from The Popol Vuh ǀ from Milton’s Paradise Lost
Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus ǀ Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, “Dream of a Ridiculous Man”
Shakespeare’s Hamlet ǀ Voltaire’s Candide ǀ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Tolstoy’s A Confession ǀ Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ǀ Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Lyric Poetry by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Herrick, Waller, Alexander Pope,
Kobayashi “Issa,” Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, P.B. Shelley, Keats, M. Arnold, Hopkins, Dickinson,
T. S. Eliot, Hardy, Frost, Owen, Pound, Yeats, D. Thomas, Akhmatova,
Celan, Radnóti, Plath, Hughes, Heaney, Larkin, Szymborska, Jorie Graham,
Auden, Natasha Trethewey, the Harlem Renaissance and Southern Renascence
from Hobbs’ Leviathan ǀ from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum ǀ from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées
from Descartes’ Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason
from Newton’s Principia ǀ from Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?”
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal ǀ from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws
from Rousseau’s A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among
Mankind, On the Social Contract ǀ from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
The Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights ǀ The Declaration of the Rights of Man/Citizen
from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Works from Thomas Carlyle ǀ from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative
from Marx’s Communist Manifesto ǀ from Darwin’s Origin of Species, The Descent of Man
from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Utilitarianism ǀ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
from Hitler’s Mein Kampf ǀ from Churchill’s Speeches
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, “I Have a Dream”
from James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” ǀ W. Faulkner’s Nobel Speech and
“Race at Morning” ǀ Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
11th Grade — The American Experience and the World™
Exploring the complex nature of the American experiment by inviting all the voices to the proverbial table to examine the aspirations achieved and yet to come in the American tradition from within its place in the world
Moby-Dick ǀ Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby ǀ Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
Ellison’s Invisible Man ǀ Miller’s The Crucible
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ǀ Faulkner’s The Reivers ǀ Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ǀ Kafka’s Metamorphosis
Dickens’ Hard Times ǀ Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, “Dream of a Ridiculous Man”
Short Fiction and Lyric Poetry by Whitman, Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Frost, Pound
Sandburg, E.A. Robinson, Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Hemingway, Eliot,
William Carlos Williams, Claude McKay, Harlem Renaissance poets, Flannery O’Connor,
W. S. Merwin, Plath, Neruda, Maya Angelou, Robert Hayden, Kerouac, Ginsberg,
Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Jhumpa Lahiri, Karen Russell,
Marianne Moore, Louise Glück, Alice Walker, Heaney, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy,
Layli Long Solider, the Harlem Renaissance and Southern Renascence Poets
Majority Decisions and Dissenting Opinions from SCOTUS ǀ Primary Historical Documents
Essays and Speeches by Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, from W. E. B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folks,
Herbert Spencer, Susan B. Anthony, John Fiske, Andrew Carnegie, Ida B. Wells,
T. Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, John Hersey, Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt, T. S. Eliot, Ortega y Gasset,
Malcom X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Steinem, Annie Dillard,
Octavio Paz, N. Scott Momaday, Marilynne Robinson, Sherman Alexie, Nicholas Carr,
from Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, from Churchill’s Speeches,
from MLK’s Speeches, JFK’s Speeches, from César Chavez Speeches, from Dolores Huerta’s Speeches, from
Ronald Reagan’s Speeches, from Barack Obama’s Speeches
12th Grade — Grasping, Mapping, and Making Worlds™
A Capstone Course—Through primary documents, literature and philosophy, grasping, mapping, and making the world according to: the oiko-nomos—derived from the ancient Greek for household management; the ways in which the human community governs itself; and a comprehensive literary survey based on Dr. Louise Cowan’s literary genre theory culminating in a thesis defended before a faculty committee and a public speech that calls up knowledge and skills from previous years’ study.
Crime and Punishment
The roots of the American democratic regime: from Plato’s Republic
from Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics ǀ from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations
Readings from Hobbes and Locke ǀ from The Federalist Papers
from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America ǀ from Marx’s Das Capital
Primary documents from The Mayflower Compact to the Constitution to the Civil Rights Era
Oedipus Rex ǀ Othello ǀ King Lear ǀ The Merchant of Venice ǀ A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Eliot’s The Waste Land ǀ A primary focus on lyric poets from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ǀ Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children ǀ Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich ǀ James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Orwell’s 1984 ǀ Camus’ The Plague ǀ Miller’s Death of a Salesman ǀ Antigone
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God ǀ Morrison’s Beloved
William Faulkner’s Light in August ǀ Short Stories from world authors
Select Essays, including James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing ǀ Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad