Some six weeks ago, I read a posting about the New York City Museum
School.  It's taken me a while to sort out my thoughts, but I hope it's not too
late to share some reflections.

When I first read the message, I thought back to my first job as a museum
educator.  A number of us sixties types had somehow been given
responsibility for creating a museum education center at Old Sturbridge
Village in Massachusetts.  We went at it with a vengeance, vowing to
rethink the way all education in New England was delivered, from primary
school up through programs for senior citizens.  As dessert, we would
proceed to reconstruct the way history itself was "done," especially in
museums, and who would do it.  It was a wild and wacky enterprise, which
did yield a splendid new building housing many studios where kids could
try their hands at making cloth, doing farm work, blacksmithing, printing,
conducting town meetings, cooking meals, even exploring the experience of
being pre-teens and teenagers in an industrializing society.  I hope some of
you have had a chance to visit it.

(A digression:  We called our building "The Horace Mann Space Center at
Old Sturbridge Village," in honor of "the father of American common
school education," and in punning tribute to the Apollo project, but the
museum's vice-president complained that Mann wasn't our list of major
donors.)

The touchstone of our work was even then an ancient text, John Dewey's
SCHOOL AND SOCIETY, published in 1900 and still (to this day) the best
book ever written on museum education.  Of course, it wasn't about
museums, but Dewey certainly loved what museums could do to build upon
a child's curiosity by the exercise of every sort of (what we would call)
learning style.  Long before Howard Gardner got his first gig in the "Frame
Shop," Dewey envisioned the group's learning as a cooperative exploration,
a social process, and a lifelong effort to make connections among
disciplines.  I cite a short excerpt:

"Take the textile room as an illustration of such a synthesis.  I am talking
about a future school, the one we hope, sometime, to have.  The basal fact in
that room is that it is a workshop, doing actual things in sewing, spinning,
and weaving.  The children come into immediate connection with the
materials, with various fabrics of silk, cotton, linen, and wool.  Information
at once appears in connection with these materials; their origin, history,
their adaptation to particular uses, and the machines of various kinds by
which the raw materials are utilized.  Discipline arises in dealing with the
problems involved, both theoretical and practical.  Whence does the culture
arise?  Partly from seeing all these things reflected through the medium of
their scientific and historic conditions and associations, whereby the child
learns how to appreciate them as technical achievements, as thoughts
precipitated; and partly because of the introduction of the art idea [i.e., what
we would call "hands-on learning," and more] into the room itself.  In the
ideal school there would be something of this sort:  first, a complete
industrial museum, ...."

(For those who don't want to cite the web as a source, here's the proper note
form:  THE CHILD AND THE CURRICULUM and THE SCHOOL AND
SOCIETY (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1956), 89-90.)

This is what we aimed to create in the Museum Education Center, a
complete industrial museum that would enhance all of a visiting child's
skills.

Fortunately there were teachers abroad in the land who were excited about
the idea, and one nearby seventh-grade teacher decided to build his whole
curriculum around coming to the museum.  Week after week, we devised
lessons in social studies, but also in music, art, science (the 19th-century
village is a wonderful laboratory in classical mechanics), architecture,
drama, mathematics, government, and so on.  The staff faced an
exhilarating challenge in discovering how many different elements of 19th-
century rural New England culture could be made relevant and exciting to
1970s 13-year-olds; we even found ourselves venturing far beyond what
academic historians had ever questioned about the past.

The key point we discovered is that a museum like Old Sturbridge Village is
both a culture and the representation of a culture.  In developing our
programs, we needed to understand how a professional world like our own
operates -- what is its own range of skills, its aesthetics and politics,
traditions and innovations.  And this exploration would allow us to read the
19th-century New England rural village as an equally complex, if much
less accessible, culture.

Most museums, of course, are efforts to represent many cultures and
historical moments, even science museums that are actually composites of
"sciences" of different disciplines, eras, and modes of investigation.
It's critical to convey this to students, who need above all to recognize
how the diverse media they confront are each shaping the world in
different ways.  History museums don't interpret the same history as
scholarly monographs or college courses, not because they aim at a wider
audience (though they do) but because their modes of representation
permit attention to different phenomena of the human experience.

For our visiting students at Sturbridge, the museum itself was not
invisible.  It
was as intriguing and puzzling as the historical world it was supposedly
interpreting.  The students had to be given a chance to see us as workers, as
people struggling with ordinary challenges as well as with the apparently
exciting responsibility of preserving and interpreting a civilization that had
disappeared.

We learned in the course of the year to design parallel investigations, not
only into the neo-classical architecture of New England but into the motives
and methods of our own interest in studying it.  As a result, we became
much more sensitive to the politics and cultural context of our own work.
The children taught us to see ourselves as historical figures, as strange to
the passing whims of American society in the 1970s as those old folks
dressed in dark capes who led horse-drawn wagons to market in Boston in 1830.

Too often museums view themselves as mere technicians, as professional
transmitters of other realities, rather than as artists, as actors, as prisms
through which the past, or the exotic, or the mysterious, is illuminated in
our own day.

Of course, as the thread which followed this original message revealed,
there are some in the museum world who want education to be anything
other than "thoughts precipitated into action."  But Dewey's vision is
still compelling to many of us who believe that even aesthetic
apprehension is (to use a wonderful 1970s word) empowering and
efficacious in the "real world."

Good luck.

Richard Rabinowitz
American History Workshop
588 Seventh Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215-3707
Phone:  718/499-6500; fax:  718/499-6575
email:  [log in to unmask]