Information Without Struggle

What I learned about the history of museum education blew my mind and helped me think more broadly about the work all museum professionals do.

In this episode, you'll learn when education first became a focus in museums and who the "Father of Museum Education" was. If you're like me, this information will surprise and challenge you as you consider why you do what you do.

Scroll down for a full transcript.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Much of the information presented in this episode comes from a book I highly recommend, especially if you want to understand the ideological beginning of our profession. Published in 1997, From Knowledge to Narrative, by Lisa C. Roberts, is an easy but beneficial read for every museum educator.

You can read my full review of this book here, or get your own copy here. (Thank you for using my affiliate link. Affiliate commissions help support this site and the work I do with museum educators. You can read my full disclaimer here.)

Episode 2 Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi, I am Rachel, a resource expert and career coach for museum educators who are stretched thin, but long to fall in love with their world-changing work. After over 15 years with my own hands in the glitter, I know how it feels when your Board thinks your work is childish because you work with children.

I know how hard it is to lead a tour on a difficult subject, and I know the frustration of waiting on a school bus that is 20 minutes late or worse, 10 minutes early as I'm heading towards the second half of my career. I find myself with a passion to help my fellow educators reverse the chronic state of being overworked and underappreciated so that they can reclaim their creativity and emotional energy.

Join me and my museum buddies as we share our best tips, tricks, and techniques for modern museum education.

Hi, everyone. Welcome back to episode two of the modern museum education podcast. I'm your host, Rachel. And today [00:01:00] we are talking all about the history of museum education because I find that to be a fascinating topic. And I think it's really important to understand, sort of, the beginning of our profession. I think that it helps shed a lot of light on what it is we are doing now, and kind of points us in a direction for how we can continue to improve what we do every day. So. 

Let me just kind of paint a picture for you about my, sort of like where I fall on the spectrum of what I think is important in a museum. So, if you remember back in 2022., I'm sure you remember, unless you were just under a rock. But Kim Kardashian wore, famously- infamously wore Marilyn Monroe's iconic "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress to the Met Gala. And this [00:02:00] moment, I mean, my, I don't know about you, but my social media feeds blew up with all of my curator friends, and a lot of my historian friends and a lot of my museum friends, just absolutely incensed that this had happened. How could they have allowed this? Look at the damage that she has done. What a tragedy for this dress, this event was.

But I gotta be honest with you. I, I did not care. It did not bother me in the least. And this is why: because I position myself professionally as an educator and my primary job at work is to help people engage with the story and the artifacts and the place and the narrative. And all I could see in this, you know, like social media [00:03:00] firestorm was people engaging with the narrative, the narrative of the dress, the narrative of Kim Kardashian, the narrative of Marilyn Monroe, the narrative of President Kennedy, the narrative of what happened to the dress and the institution that owns it now ,Ripley's Believe It or Not, the Met Gala. 

I mean the Gala, I mean, everything, it was just the whole story. People were talking about it. No one would have been talking about Marilyn Monroe, her impact, her influence, her story at all, if Kim Kardashians had not put that dress on her own person and walked the red carpet, wearing it. So for me, I thought this is, this is, uh, an amazing experience. And so it didn't, it didn't ruffle my feathers. I have to be honest. It did not ruffle my feathers. So, what does all this have to do with the history of museum education? 

I think that that experience for me solidified [00:04:00] the fact that I am entirely focused on a person's experience. How they are experiencing the history, experiencing the art. Like, are they, are they experiencing the narrative? And when that event happened all I could think about was a book that I had read during 2020. So back during the pandemic, in 2020 when I had nothing else to do, except, you know, make a lot of banana bread, I was reading a bunch of books about museum education, and I read a book that, I love this book and I can't wait to share more about it with you.

Um, this is the book. It is called "From Knowledge to Narrative" by Lisa Roberts. And I believe that this book began its life as her thesis. 

And then it expanded into [00:05:00] this book. It's a very interesting case study of one particular exhibit, in one particular museum. And it's the story of the exhibit development itself. And she juxtaposes all of the decisions that are happening in this late 20th century museum, with the history of museums and museum education in general. The book was published in, I should've checked before I started recording the late nineties. I believe. Um, hold on. Let me look. 

97. It was published in 1997. So, um, it, at this point, you know, it's like a 25 year old book, but because it is talking about history, it still holds up. And it is absolutely worth the read. I'll put a link to the book in the show notes, so make sure you check those out. But what this book, um, [00:06:00] what I learned from this book, really blew my mind because honestly, I had never been taught the history of museum education. In my museum studies classes in graduate school, we talked a very little, teeny, tiny bit about museology, the history of museums, but really we never went down that path in any meaningful way. And as a history person, I do find the history of what we do so impactful. So this book was, was really a phenomenal read. It's actually a pretty easy read. It, it, it reads quickly, it's, it's kind of a fun read, so I would highly recommend it for those reasons. But what I learned when I read this book, looking back on the history of the American museum and the development of the idea of [00:07:00] education in those institutions, really helps me understand why what we do matters. I know that it matters and I can point to a lot of, um, research that explores why what we do matters. But this, understanding that the history of it is, is interesting because back in the, you know, back in the 1800s, the early 1900s, museum professionals did not have access to the kind of research that we have access today, to say this matters, education in this institution matters. So they were kind of just developing these ideas on their own. They're developing these ideas on the fly and, and seeing what works, like testing it in practice. 

Okay. So what I'd like to do in this episode is kind of paint you the picture of the history, the early history of museum [00:08:00] education to, to help inspire you in the same way that it inspired me. So to get started, let's kind of cast our minds back to museums in early America. Museums in early America had a very important role to play. So you have to imagine, like, think about the context of what we're talking about. We're talking about a brand new country. And their primary motivation for establishing museums is to establish what makes them unique and separate and apart from, primarily England, since we're talking about the American Revolution, they're kind of, you know, they're breaking away from England. But also kind of just Europe in general. They're very much focused on celebrating and elevating what it means to be an American. So they're setting themselves apart. They [00:09:00] are attempting to juxtapose American museums with the European model. And that's a very important distinction. 

But these early American museums had a bit of an identity crisis. 

Because they're kind of caught in between this tension in early America over what exactly democracy looks like. So early American museums were very democratic in one sense. They were democratic in the sense that they were established for all of the people, as opposed to this think, like the European model from the 1700s where these institutions are very, very elite and lower class people, marginalized people are absolutely not invited. American museums by contrast were attempting to be democratic. [00:10:00] However, the people in charge of these museums where white men. And their, their collecting policies, their exhibition policies, they're all centered around the values that these, mostly wealthy white men, believed to be, um, valuable expressions of what it meant to be an American. So they were not democratic in that way at all. They were, they tend, they, they, by default were elitist and white centric and male centric. And marginalized stories, of course, were not a part of those of that early American narratives. So. 

So that's sort of the context for the very beginning of the American museum profession. 

And what happens almost immediately is Jacksonian America. [00:11:00] Where you have this kind of rising up of the less elite. You know, we can debate whether it was middle-class in the way that we understand middle-class today, um, but I think if you just use the term "less elite," you understand what I'm talking about here? So there is this, this sense that, that regular people, right, can, not only can, but should be honored above everyone else in this country. Sort of, you know, the pull yourself up by your own bootstraps kind of mentality. Like those like hardworking, regular people. So, there is definitely a moment in the American museum where 

regular people become the primary audience. And this causes [00:12:00] two things to happen. There's two reactions inside of the museum. Some museums swing in one direction and they say, you know what? There is entirely too much rabble in our institution. So we're going to create barriers. We're going to um, make it difficult for all of that, you know, those, rabble-rousers, all of those regular people to get in here and sort of mess up our collection. And the other reaction is the exact opposite reaction. Where some museums start to emulate popular entertainment, particularly sideshows, to try to bring in more of those regular people. 

Both groups of [00:13:00] museums had the same goal. Their goal was to create spaces that expressed what it meant to be an American. Some museums went kind of towards a more solemn approach: this is a sort of sacred, if you will space. And some people, some museums went in the opposite direction and said: this is a popular space and we want to make it fun. We want people, we want people to want to come here. So we're going to do what, you know, the side shows and the hucksters do, in order to entice visitors to come in the doors. So at this point in the American museum, they're not talking about learning per se, but there is definitely a conversation happening in the, you know, late Colonial, not Colonial, but like [00:14:00] in the Jacksonian, Early Republic kind of era, there was definitely a conversation happening about the experience in a museum and what should the experience be? So this brings us to my first question. I would like for you to think for yourself about what do you think the role of experience plays in a museum? 

On a scale of one to 10, how important is experience in the museum? 

Okay. So the second point that I want to share with you is about what happens in the mid to late 1800s. So it's kind of the next moment when we see some big ideological shifts happening in the museum field. These shifts towards what we will eventually call museum education, [00:15:00] were as Lisa Roberts explains in her book "From Knowledge to Narrative", they were preceded by changes in society that she says, saw the collapse of the aristocratic social order and the rise of the middle-class. So, if you think about American history, and what is happening in this country in the middle of the 1800s, 

you are obviously going to be thinking about the Civil War. But that's not the only, the, maybe the, you could,, you could argue the most dramatic breakdown in our country at that time. But there were a lot of other breakdowns happening. the Established social orders were crumbling under their own weight. And you start to, of course it takes a few more decades, but you start to see this in women's suffrage, And then the aftermath of the civil war in reconstruction. You see this in the [00:16:00] earliest, like those early civil rights movements. Um, not even what we call the Civil Rights Movement, but the, the early movement in Black America for equal rights you see happening in those years, like immediately after the Civil War. There's all of this breakdown in our American culture. Um, this sort of shifting in the culture about what is, and is not important obviously is going to be reflected and impacted both by what's happening in the museum field in general.

So let's talk a little bit about what's going on in American museums in what is probably my most favorite time period in American history to study, which is the Gilded Age. So the Gilded Age refers to the late 19th and very early 20th century. So the gilded age was a time where money was [00:17:00] flowing wildly in this country. And in addition, there's a lot of progressive movements. Now from our 21st century perspective, you might think it's not all that progressive, but students of history, we call this the Progressive Movement. It was progressive at the time. 

So during this sort of moment in history where it's. Everything is kind of glittery, but there's a sense that like, if you kind of scrape scrape off that gold, the veneer, you're going to see that, the reality is that nothing was very progressive and the money wasn't actually flowing. And there were a lot of people who were supporting the wealthier members of society uh, through hard labor. Um, And, um, unfair wages and there was quite [00:18:00] a, a, there was a huge poverty gap you know, a huge gap between the haves and the have-nots. And so that's, that's one of the things I think is so fascinating about the Gilded Age. And I think it's so indicative of the role of museum education, that museum education- what we do now really begins at this moment in time. Where you have a, a pretense towards philanthropy, but it doesn't really go beyond the surface, if that makes sense. So the museums at that time, late 1800s, early 1900s, they're grappling with some big questions about the role of museums in society. They're asking themselves, "What is it that we do? And why do we do it? Is our primary role to preserve heritage? Is our [00:19:00] primary role to instruct on heritage? Is our primary role, um, all about raising up lower classes and creating quote-unquote, better Americans? Is our role to shape the moral character of our country?" These are the questions that museums were asking. You could argue that museums in the late 18 and early 1900s were asking the Gilded Age equivalent of "Are museums neutral?" Just like we're asking that question today a hundred years later, which is why I find this subject forever fascinating. 

These questions about the role of museums in society were complicated in the late 1800s by the rise of the, of science, basically. As you move through the 1800s, science [00:20:00] becomes something that people not only are more familiar with, but they are in more in support of, and the role of science becomes very important in culture. And you can really see this play out in the museum field with the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. So when the Smithsonian Institution was founded, they, that institution began as an organization that supports the role of science in our culture, essentially. 

The very first secretary of the Smithsonian, Joseph Henry, he interpreted the founding documents of that organization quite literally. And he was determined that the Smithsonian be dedicated solely to the advancement of knowledge, rather than incorporating what [00:21:00] he believed to be popular entertainment. 

So the development of the Smithsonian Institution kind of takes the museum field back towards those early American institutions that considered the, the museum to be a sacred and solemn um, place that where you can reverently contemplate the value of American culture, as opposed to those organizations that were more popular and sort of like side showy and trying to bring in the masses. 

So that's kind of where Gilded Age museums are getting their inspiration from. They're looking to the Smithsonian, even at that time, looking to the Smithsonian as a sort of Vanguard of what museums can and should be in this country. And there's very much a sense that museums should be a solemn place of learning. 

However, as you move into the gilded age and through the [00:22:00] gilded age and up into the brand new 20th century, you can see the impact of changing philosophies on what museums understood their role to be. So there's a couple of things happening at this time period. One. There is a sense that art is redemptive. There's a, there is an, uh, belief that looking at art, just, just looking at it can maybe not save a person's soul in a religious context, but can, sort of save their soul in a political context, if that makes sense. That there is a, that by viewing art, it can sort of redeem you as a person. And it can make you a better member of society. And in this case, American society. There was also a growing sense [00:23:00] um, that there was a canon, if you will, of quality art. So there begins to be this, this kind of concept around art that art should ennoble, and not entertain. And that good quality art can do this, but popular um, less refined art cannot do this. And so you start to see it kind of a split between what is considered to be worth a person's time to view and engage with, and what is not. 

And this is further complicated at this time by changing understanding of learning. There was, a growing belief in the inherent power of an object to teach. That you could, by looking at a piece of art or looking at uh, you know, an ancient Roman sculpture or [00:24:00] looking at some kind of, you know, vase, you could actually just, just by looking at it, you could grow in your knowledge. 

So consequently museums as they're moving into and through the Gilded Age, they are, they're getting cluttered basically by all of this stuff. Because there was a belief that just by viewing the stuff, you could become a better person. And there was absolutely a focus on this solemn, serious, sacred role of museums to create better Americans through learning. And this is where you start to see learning, coming into the museum conversation. But the sense by many at the time, was that the way to learn how to be a good American [00:25:00] or how to learn about our society was to just be in the very, in the mere presence of quality pieces, good art. And what was defined as good art was set by, you know, the elite, right? The, the highly educated. Again, white mostly men. And very wealthy. 

So the museums at that point in time, late 18, early 1900s, Gilded Age museums were heavily funded by philanthropists who were, as we call them now, for the most part, industrial barons, like Rockefeller, right? People of that ilk. That's that's who we're talking about. That's where the money for museums was largely coming from. And they were definitely philanthropic. In a sense, they were, um, [00:26:00] wanting to support the masses to kind of raise them out. There is definitely kind of a savior mentality happening here. They're wanting to raise up the masses to create a better American society for a better American future into the new 20th century. 

But essentially what you kind of have ended up with for the most part in America were museums that were modeling themselves on the Smithsonian's, um, mindset of being a serious place of learning. And learning, they believed happened by just being in the mere presence of the objects. And these objects and the institutions that housed them were funded by Gilded Age philanthropists, people, men primarily who are wealthy. Wealthy men [00:27:00] who, wealthy white men, let's be very specific, who believed that they knew best what narrative would serve the American populace in general. But here's the thing. Here's the rub. 

Americans at that point in time were not flocking to these elite museum institutions. They were not. You know where they were going? They were going to World's Fairs. Why? Because World's Fairs were infinitely more fun. That's where the people were going. They weren't going to these boring museums. They were going to World's Fairs. 

So what is a museum person to do? 

 They had to, they were facing this same exact conflict that museum professionals 75 years earlier were facing when [00:28:00] they were trying to, trying to decide whether to emulate sideshows or whether to be places of serious learning. Only, the only difference here is that they're not emulating sideshows. They're emulating World's Fairs. 

 But what I find so incredibly fascinating about this particular moment in the history of museums and museum education is the impact that World's Fairs have on the museum profession because Exhibitions and World's Fairs had kind of an ostensibly educational role, but what made them different from other educational institutions of the time, like schools and colleges and universities and museums, was that World's Fairs and Exhibitions did not shy away from the, from the element of popular entertainment. And as, as Lisa Roberts says in her book, one commentator at the time essentially summed [00:29:00] up this edutainment role of World's Fairs by saying that World's Fairs and Exhibitions offered, quote. "Information without struggle". 

And to me that phrase sums up what museum education is all about. We offer information without struggle. We are trying to, um, remove, I think that good education in a museum now focuses on removing all barriers, to be able to offer information without struggle. 

Okay. So this brings me to my last point that I'm going to share with you today, the last part of this early history of museum education. I'm going to tell you about the father of museum education. When I learned this, it blew my actual mind. Which I mean, in context, it makes [00:30:00] sense because at the time all museum professionals, where what? They were curators. There was no other museum profession to be. If you worked in a museum, you were by default, a curator. But when I actually read the words that the father of museum education was by training a curator, it kind of, it kind of made my brain like twitch a little bit. Um, because for me, I always thought about curation and education as like opposite sides of the coin, right? We're sort of like an opposite sides of the museum. Curators tend to focus inward, on the exhibits, on the collection. Whereas educators focus outward, on the people, on the narrative, on the experience. And it, so, yeah, so it just kind of rocked my professional world a little bit when I realized this. But actually, although he was by profession a curator, [00:31:00] he was by action, an educator. And that's why he's called the father of museum education. I have not told you his name yet. So let me tell you who he is. His name is John Cotton Dana, and he, he was born in 1856. He died in 1929. So he, you know, he was in the midst of his career during the Gilded Age. He started as a librarian and he worked at the Denver library and in Denver, he did something that was radical at the time. He instituted what was called the open stack policy, which basically means if you want to borrow a book from the Denver library, you would walk into the library and go to the bookshelf and find it for yourself. This was at the time a revolutionary idea. For other libraries and up until this point in Denver as well, if you wanted a book, you would go into the library and you would go up to the desk. And [00:32:00] the librarian, the gatekeeper, would be standing there. And you would say, um, I would like a book on, you know, whatever, dinosaurs. And the librarian would decide which book on dinosaurs you want. And they would bring that book to you and let you check that out and let you read that book. And what John Cotton Dana did was to say, "maybe let's move away from gatekeeping the information. Maybe let's trust the public to be able to pick their own books." This was wildly revolutionary and actually a highly timely topic for us to be talking about these days, in terms of, you know, book banning and things of that nature that are happening across our country at the moment. So this is, you know, so again, it's another reason why we should study history. Right? 

But John Cotton Dana saw libraries and later museums as vibrant [00:33:00] community centers where the public can come together to learn, sort of on their own terms. He later becomes a founder and a curator at the Newark Museum of Art. And he, John Cotton Dana continues his work to sort of like, kind of open the doors a little bit for, for museums and trying to not focus so much on gatekeeping the collection. But opening it up to let the people kind of choose for themselves, what they want to know more about. These, what, what he talks about, what he, what he was doing in his museum work in the late 18, early 1900s very much echoes this thing, kind of things that, you know, um, like Dr. John Falk and Lynn Dierking and other leaders in museum education in the late 20th and early 21st century [00:34:00] are talking about in terms of free choice learning and, um, experience, experiential learning. That's what John Cotton Dana was trying to establish literally a hundred years earlier. So I find him infinitely fascinating. He was definitely, um, you know, uh, forward thinking museum professional. 

There's a, there's a great quote that is attributed to John Cotton Dana that says, um, apparently he said, "a great department store, easily accessible open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any museum we have yet established." So his point is that museums ought to be places where people can come when they went. And learn on their own terms. And that is why he is considered to be the father of museum education. 

It is important that we remember, however, that John Cotton Dana was a man of his own time.So he [00:35:00] was, he was part of the progressive movement, which, as I mentioned earlier, it was progressive for its time, but today would not be seen as something that we should emulate because there definitely was a sense that, um, only certain kinds of people knew what was best for everyone. And that it's not obviously the, um, the attitude that we have today, particularly in museums. But it is significant to know that this shift away from, um, very closed, like museum professionals are on the inside, and what you, as the public, learned is determined only by what the museum professional wants you to learn. That shift, away from that, was happening in the early 1900s. Even though when I studied museum education, I was learning that those kinds of shifts were not happening until the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. But the [00:36:00] truth is they were happening a hundred years earlier. But to a more limited degree, you know, change takes, big change, takes a lot of time. 

But what is significant about this moment in the history of museums, the Gilded Age, is that you have, this is where the split happens between, the departments that become curators and the departments that become educators, there's a split in professionalism. At the time there were some museum professionals who said, they kind of, they doubled down, they doubled down, on the knowledge that museums exist to curate, to collect, and to, um, you know, create knowledge. And then there were other professionals like John Cotton Dana, who said "no, no, museums exist to disseminate knowledge, to educate people."[00:37:00] 

In the end, you know, both, both sides of the coin here, both departments, both groups of museum professionals have the same goal in mind. It's it's, it's all about the public. It's always been about the public. Museums have always been about the public. If, if, if it's not about the public, then you don't have a museum. You have a private collection. And I think that's something that, particularly in my professional experience, in museum education, I think we often forget. That the other departments in our institutions, they do have the same goal. Museums are always about the people. It's about the public. It's how we help them. And the methods that we use that are different. But for me understanding this, the history of museum education, and how we got to where we are and the, how the split happened, helped me have a better, uh, [00:38:00] understanding for my museum colleagues who aren't educators. 

So once I really grasped this concept that you know, that curators and educators, weren't like, you know, rock 'em, sock, 'em robots that are like fighting with each other, even though we're attached to the same base, um, but that actually were more like, you know, the offense and the defense on the same team, like we have, we have the same goal in mind, we just approach it differently, once I understood that, it really helped me understand my colleagues in curatorial and research positions so much better. So I hope that this episode has been helpful to you. I hope it's been interesting to you. Maybe, maybe you've learned something you didn't know about museum education. Um, if this topic is at all interesting to you, I cannot highly, I could not more highly recommend um, the book "From Knowledge to Narrative", like I said, you can get the link to that book in my show notes. [00:39:00] If you go to my website, ModernMuseumEducation.com/podcast/002 that will get you the show notes for this episode, where you can find the link. 

You can also find the link to sign up for my email list there as well, where you can access all of my free resources for museum educators and be the first to know as things are developing for our website and our community. As always, I would be so grateful if you would like, and subscribe to this podcast, share it with your colleagues in the field, help other people find out about it, leave a review so that the, all of the algorithms know that this podcast is valuable.

We would love to create a really intentional community of museum educators. Uh, like I've said before, my biggest goal right now, my I'm on a mission to help museum educators do their world changing work easier with less stress and with more support. 

So thank you so [00:40:00] much for joining us, and I'll see you back next time. And in the meantime, please remember that your work is not childish just because you work with children.