It’s rare to find anthropology offered at the high school level. It’s even rarer to find it taught one-to-one by a domain expert, built entirely around your curiosities. At Cicero Learning, this Anthropology Course offers just that—a unique opportunity to explore how humans live, think, and relate to one another across cultures, time, and geography. Whether you’re interested in ancient rituals or modern social movements, together we’ll build a customized curriculum that brings anthropology to life.
Our online Anthropology Course is built around you. Whether you’re fascinated by indigenous cosmologies, forensic anthropology, or global fashion systems, we’ll tailor the syllabus to spark your curiosity. This course can be designed as a semester-long introduction or a full-year deep dive into one of the richest and most interdisciplinary fields you’ll encounter.
You’ll meet one-to-one with a Cicero teacher and together build the course around your interests and your questions. No prior experience with anthropology is needed—just curiosity and a willingness to see the world differently.
How the Course Works
You’ll meet twice a week with your teacher in live, one-on-one sessions. Each meeting is a conversation, guided by your teacher, but shaped by your ideas. We might work through a short ethnography together, record and produce a podcast analyzing a cultural ritual, or create a zine consolidating your ideas from the course.
Your sessions might involve:
- Comparing fieldwork methods across different regions and disciplines
- Reading excerpts from foundational texts (like Margaret Mead or Franz Boas)
- Discussing contemporary issues like climate justice, human migration, or social media and identity
- Designing place-based or project-based research you can conduct locally
Between sessions, you’ll be assigned a combination of reading, reflection, creative assignments, or mini-research tasks—always tailored to your level, pace, and passions.
What You Might Study
Like all Cicero Learning courses, your Anthropology Course is personalized—but here are some core ideas and topics that might appear:
- Cultural Anthropology
- Explore how humans build meaning through language, art, kinship, religion, and ritual.
- Topics might include:
- Symbolic systems
- Food culture and taboos
- Gift economies and reciprocity
- Gender and social roles across cultures
- Biological and Evolutionary Anthropology
- Examine how humans evolved and how we relate biologically to other primates.
- You might explore:
- Evolution and adaptation
- Fossil records and early hominins
- Human variation and genetics
- The history—and politics—of race
- Archaeology
- Look at the material traces of human life from thousands of years ago to today.
- Topics might include:
- Excavation methods
- Ancient cities and trade routes
- Interpreting artifacts
- Debates over cultural heritage and repatriation
- Linguistic Anthropology
- Study how language shapes thought, identity, and power.
- You might investigate:
- Dialects and code-switching
- Language extinction and revitalization
- Political speech and propaganda
- The anthropology of texting, memes, and digital culture
- Applied and Medical Anthropology
- Learn how anthropologists work in real-world contexts—designing public health systems, supporting refugee resettlement, or informing climate policy.
Projects and Assessments
Together we’ll decide how you’ll show what you’ve learned. This could look like:
- An ethnographic project, interviewing people in your own community
- A multimedia presentation on a cultural ritual or tradition
- A critical response paper to an ethnographic film
- A portfolio of creative responses to texts
- A written reflection comparing two different anthropological perspectives
Assessment will be rooted in engagement: Are you reading closely? Are you asking thoughtful questions? Are you building a deeper awareness of the world around you? That’s what matters most.
Why Take an Anthropology Course?
Anthropology asks the questions you didn’t know you needed to ask:
- Why do people eat what they eat?
- What counts as “normal” in one place but not in another?
- How do rituals, myths, and social rules shape us—even when we don’t notice them?
It’s a course for anyone who wants to understand the complexity of human life. And it’s especially valuable for students interested in international relations, sociology, political science, literature, medicine, art, history—or who just want to understand the world better.
Anthropology gives you a toolkit for living curiously and compassionately in a rapidly changing world.
Cicero’s Approach
At Cicero, we pair each student with a teacher who builds the course around you. That means we can adapt to your level, pace, and interests—whether you’re preparing for college-level work or just discovering anthropology for the first time.
Because our model is one-to-one, we can also integrate:
- Place-based learning (studying culture through where you are)
- Project-based learning (building knowledge through hands-on exploration)
- Creative expression (photography, sketching, or writing assignments)
- Multilingual learning (for bilingual or international students)
Our students are curious, unconventional, often traveling or exploring education outside traditional systems. We meet them where they are, and help them build knowledge that matters.
