Where Does the History of Museum Education Begin?

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the editor

Nathaniel Prottas has worked in museum education for over 15 years, beginning as a lecturer at the Cloisters in New York. Since 2017 he has been the Director of Education and Visitor Services at the Wien Museum (the City Museum of Vienna) in Austria. Nathaniel holds Ph.D. in art history from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an M.A. in the same subject from University College, London. He has taught both art history and museum education as a visiting professor at Hunter College (New York), The Technical University of Dortmund (Germany), Tulane University (Ferrara, Italy), and The University of Vienna (Austria).

Notes

1 George E. Hein has suggested that the American impulse to education in the museum can be traced further back, to Charles Wilson Peale, whose advocation for educational museums was coeval with the developments in Europe. Hein, “A Democratic Theory of Museum Education.” On the inherently educational nature of the museum, see also: Hein, “A Democratic Theory of Museum Education.”

2 Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum. See Chapter two. On the history of docent, see also: Giltinan, “The Early History of Docents in American Art Museums.”

3 Hochreiter, Vom Musentempel zum Lernort. In another context, on the shift in museums and how its relationship to the public and education has changed, seen Anderson, Reinventing the Museum.

4 Hein has argued that this is the case, although he has suggested that the aristocratic nature of the collections and the monarchical government of the countries in which the museums were founded negated a truly democratic ideal, one he sees only emerging first in the United States. Hein, “A Democratic Theory of Museum Education.” This is in some ways the major theme of his important book, Hein, Progressive Museum Education. Nora Sternfeld, on the other hand, has argued for a radically-democratic museum ideal, one she links back to the very founding of one of the earliest museums, the Louvre. Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum.

5 Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and Gallery Education.

6 Sternfeld, Das Radikaldemokratische Museum, 60. Debates have raged about where to pinpoint the exact origins of the museum, from Kunst- and Wunderkammer to revolutionary France, to eighteenth-century Germany. For debates on the origins of the museum, see: Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Paul, The First Modern Museums of Art; and Savoy, Temple der Kunst.

7 Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum.

8 Häntzschel, “‘Das Humboldt-Forum ist wie Tschernobyl.’”

9 The critique of power structures is one of the four models of museum education that Carmen Mörsch describes in her influential text, Mörsch, “Am Kreuzungspunkt von vier Diskursen.”

10 For a comparison of how revolutionary the Belvedere and the Louvre were, see Pommier, “Wien 1780-Pari 1793.” There is however debate about how modern the Belvedere was. For a critique of the Belvedere through the lens of Foucauldian theories of power, see Meijers, “Kunst als Natur.” As Andrew McClellan hast noted, the guide books provided at the door in the early years of the Louvre were of no help the illiterate visitor, and in any case provided only tombstone information. Paul, “Musee Du Louvre, Paris,” 232.

11 Quoted in Meijers, “Kunst als Natur,” xi.

12 Of course a written guide would do little for illiterate visitors, as McClellan has noted in relation to the Louvre. Paul, “Museé du Louvre, Paris,” 232.

13 The efficacy of Melchel's gallery guide and his display of art in general were not universally admired. On the reception of his work, see Yonan, “Kunsthistoriches Museum/ Belvedere, Vienna,” 180–6.

14 This is one of the major claims of his Foucauldian book on the origins of the museum. He argues that the Belvedere was still part of an older system of cultural power in which all objects were legitimated monarchical power, not to the modern episteme's system of display developed by the modern museum. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 23. Manny industrialists also made their collections available to the “the masses,” and there are many examples of civic projects to build villages for workers that also included art galleries that might be a civilizing and ennobling influence, such as the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool.

15 Quoted in Gaehtgens, “Altes Museum, Berlin,” 286.

16 Ibid.

17 On plaster casts in the debates about the pedagogical goals of the museum, see Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum, 20; Musacchio, “Plaster Casts, Peepshows, and a Play.”

18 On the history of science museums, for example, see Radler, Life on Display. Hooper-Greenhill has also traced the museum back to the Wunderkammer. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Chapter 1. On their relationship to the Wunderkammer, see Kryzysztof, Collections and Curiosities. He argues that the shift from displays rarities to typical examples marked the move from Wunderkammer to natural history museum, a move he attributes to pedagogical concerns in the new museums that were not present in the older Wunderkammern. The criteria by which we judge if these were “modern museums” is of course a controversial one. Many scholars turn to ICOM's definition of a museum, but the proto-museum might well be located in other institutions that fail to fit all of the criteria of the modern museum.