WHAT MAKES YOU THINK MUSEUMS ARE EDUCATIONAL?

JANE R. GLASER

Museums also are for musing

The word “muse” means to cogitate, mediate, think, dream, ponder, contemplate, and deliberate. For more than 2,000 years, people have created places where very special and valuable objects, artifacts, and works of art provide the milieu for “musing.”The word is derived from the Muses in Greek mythology. These nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, presided over the arts and learning, including history, music, tragedy, dance, comedy, astronomy, and epic, love, and sacred poetry. From these Muses came the Greek word mouseion,“place of the Muses,”or a place to study, and our English usage of the word “museum.”

The earliest museum may have been in 3rd century Alexandria, Egypt, where Ptolemy I began collecting Greek and Roman papyri. In ancient Rome, museums were temples, and the colonnades surrounding the marketplace were full of works of art and historical objects (including military “trophies”). Like the Greek mouseion, they were dedicated to the Muses. The beautiful objects helped stimulate public and philosophical discussion.

The term “museum” was first used to describe a collection in Renaissance Florence.Museums in the 15th century contained art and objects amassed by the church or by the wealthy and princely families of Europe. Humanist popes in Rome and other clergy and lay people started collecting classical, medieval, and Romanesque statues and antiquities in Italy. Some collections were described as “cabinets of curiosity,” or “cabinets of the world.” The very wealthy Medici family in Florence was among the princely groups outside the church who assembled great art collections for the pleasure of family members and friends. Objects were not exhibited in any planned way, but were haphazardly hung or placed in luxurious surroundings.

In the 16th century, there were Italian galleries of pictures and sculpture, and cabinets of natural history collections. In the 17th century, botanical gardens began to appear. The first university museum was founded in 1671 in Basel, Switzerland. The museums of the 18th and early 19th centuries still were exclusively for the nobility, the elite, and the highly educated. They were not intended for the public. England’s first public museum was the Ashmolean, which opened in 1683 at Oxford University. The first true national museum, the British Museum, was founded in 1753. It opened its doors to the public on a daily basis in 1879. The Danish National Museum, founded in 1807, made a concerted effort to educate the “peasants,” as they would have been the ones most likely to discover the nation’s prehistoric artifacts while tilling the soil.

THE MUSEUMS OF THE UNITED STATES

Unlike the evolution of museums in Europe, public museums in the United States preceded private collections. They were established late in the 18th century in fashions similar to the “cabinets of curiosities” and, like them,were not very accessible to the general public.Many of the collections were limited to local natural history and art by American painters. These collections were founded, for the most part, by Americans looking to identify uniquely American components reflecting the new nation’s changing and expanding cultural experiences.

John Adams, second president of the United States, predicted the future of cultural life in America in a famous letter to his wife:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics, philosophy, geography, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary.

Reflecting the evolution of American society, museum development in the United States might best be described in its various phases, with obvious overlaps. First came the age of the private society (cabinets of curiosities), followed by the age of “popular” or commercial museums (self-education through entertainment). The museum then evolved into the academic museum (research and teaching), later giving rise to the public museum (more democratic). Eventually,America saw the emergence of the educational museum (increasing professionalism), and museums as they are today.

The few museums of the late 18th century were collections of miscellaneous materials displayed for society’s elite. In 1785, Charles Willson Peale, an eminent portraitist who had an art gallery in his home, noticed that his visitors also took great interest in his shells, minerals, and mounted birds. Thus the Peale Museum in Philadelphia was started for the purpose of displaying “natural curiosities.” It later evolved into the Academy of Natural Sciences. Peale had difficulty balancing educating and entertaining, while seeking to create a repository for his collections.

A significant development in the history of American museums occurred when entrepreneur P.T. Barnum opened his American Museum in 1841 in New York City. With a bizarre collection of curiosities and exotic performers, Barnum exploited, in a commercial way, the demand for popular learning in the United States. In addition to collections of shells, rocks, minerals, and fish, he had performing midgets, fleas, snakes, and whales, and a white elephant from Siam. He also displayed wax figures and panoramic scenes...forerunners of dioramas, perhaps. Barnum touched on what we know as museum interpretation and authenticity. Learning, if properly presented, was an American preoccupation with box office appeal. A genuine pioneer in his understanding of the educational and entertainment power of museums, Barnum is perhaps known best for the traveling circus that evolved in large part from the American Museum.

In the early years of the 20th century, America’s museums became educational institutions in earnest, and museum work emerged from “club activity” to “public service.” Museums began to cooperate with schools, sometimes establishing schools of their own. The first school museum was established in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903. On the East Coast, the Newark Museum was an early educational institution, and its founder, John Cotton Dana, wrote in 1917:

Communities are still taxing themselves to get, and are asking private benefactors to get for them, marble palaces with those so-called emblems of culture, rare and costly and wonder-working objects.We can only say that, frankly, we cannot discover advantages to any community, from the presence in it of one of these culture-fetishes, at all commensurate with its cost. It serves no definite and expressed needs. It is alien to its community in every respect of that community’s life.

Putting into practice his strong belief that museums should educate all elements of the public, Dana established a program at the Newark Museum for what was likely the first “community” museum in the United States, reaching out to minorities, the disadvantaged, and the uneducated.

With the advent of the automobile, national parks, state parks, and historic landmarks drew unprecedented numbers of visitors, and they began to establish visitor centers that imitated and shared the educational responsibilities of museums. Theirs was a different kind of mission, however, aimed at preserving, studying, and interpreting our natural, as well as cultural, heritage. These natural and historic sites probably recognized the advantages (exposure for more visitors) and disadvantages (deterioration and damage to property) of “cultural tourism” long before museum people began to discuss it. Out-of-the-way historic houses, in particular, became popular destinations for motorists.

Larger museums began lending collections to smaller ones, and schools received objects on loan for the first time. Not even the Great Depression or World War II deterred museum visitors. In fact, in hard times people seemed to need museums more than ever. Museums were free, for the most part, and they took one’s mind off the problems and restrictions of daily life. As America’s family farms and small towns began to disappear,museums that preserved the past were sought out for the sake of both scholarship and nostalgia.When the preservation movement began in earnest in the 1920s, “living history”museums were established. These “total environments” bestowed a sense of “community” upon static museum buildings and honored regional events and famous people like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Henry Ford.

Just as important, they evidenced the continuation of private support for museums. The newer art museums that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s from the private collections of Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and other industrialists catered to elite audiences quite different from those nurtured by history and natural history museums.

There were still conflicting ideas about the educational role of museums. Some viewed museums as social instruments, a way to help improve society.Others, such as Dana, argued that museums were an educational force contributing to the economic and cultural life of their communities. Still others questioned whether education could solve society’s ills. And some believed every object of art should communicate to the viewer with as little interference (interpretation) as possible.

The steady increase in museum attendance also gave rise to questions about quality vs. quantity.Were numbers a reliable indicator of excellence or success? The doubters were overwhelmed by the proliferation of museum activities, including conducted tours, loan collections, lectures, and special interest groups. More and more people from all walks of life came to museums.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

By the latter half of the 20th century, new thoughts were emerging about the roles and responsibilities of museums. Alma Wittlin, author of Museums: In Search of a Usable Future (1970), recalled the 1960s as “a time for meandering questions more than for definite answers. If museums did not exist, would people of the twentieth century feel the need to invent them?” In Search of Excellence (1983) by Thomas J. Peters and Robert W. Waterman, Jr., related not at all to museums but inspired many in the museum field to search for excellence among American museums. The 1982-1988 Kellogg Foundation/Smithsonian Educational Project (Office of Museum Programs) was an example of a major initiative to search for museum educational excellence. Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, declared that the museum possesses “a great potential, not only as a stabilizing, regenerative force in modern society, but as a crusading force for quality and excellence.”

The museum field continues to seek answers. During the past several decades, museums in the United States have taken giant steps toward professionalism, quality, integrity, and, indeed, excellence in museum education. In its search for excellence, the museum community has been attempting to define itself and its essential characteristics. Are high attendance figures an indication of excellence? A.E. Parr, former director of the American Museum of Natural History, warned that:

The grossness of pure quantitative self-esteem may also back-fire in the end... It should not be forgotten that the Roman circuses likewise enjoyed attendance records. The question is not how many arrive, but how well they are served by what they find when they get there.

The barometer for the search for excellence may be found in the great commonality among museums the world over that seek to collect and preserve, research, exhibit, interpret, and, yes, communicate and provide learning experiences. Transcending differences in political systems and cultures, museums have an enthusiastic commitment to preserve and share the resources of our world and human history.

Indeed, we may be returning to the philosophy of the mouseion in a way, but today the museum is the learning center and “academy” for the general public rather than for the elite, a place where everyone may “muse,” inquire, cogitate, and communicate. According to S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from 1964-1984,“Somewhere within these realms [museums] there are clues to our understanding of ourselves, and, I suspect, our survival.”

Despite the financial constraints museums face today, the societal and technological changes taking place in the world promise exciting and innovative museums of the future.Museum administrators have open minds as to how best to serve diverse communities, how information management will streamline their operations and communications, how they may take advantage of the inventive and imaginative techniques for enhancement of exhibitions, and how, most importantly, they can create resolute educational institutions.Without sacrificing their traditional roles of scholarship and conservation, museums may be in the forefront as masters of communications and as agents of change.

As agents of change, the museums of today must deal with cultural diversity, growth of the older adult population, population shifts, and the state of education. Important consideration must be given to advanced technologies, the endangered Earth, social problems, gender equity, accessibility, and economic efficiency. Museums must clarify their positions in their communities, not as “Epcots” or “mega malls,” but as unique educational institutions, contributing to the quality of life that cannot be lost to the next generations.

Jane R. Glaser (CC ’03), author of Museums: A Place to Work, has worked in several senior positions at the Smithsonian Institution, and served as director of a children’s museum.

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