Where Does the History of Museum Education Begin?

When Carissa DiCindio sent the Journal of Museum Education a proposal for the present special issue focused on the history of museum education, I had just begun work on a Virtual Special Issue about the changing status of museum education as documented in the journal over the last 40 years. It thus seemed like fate that, at the moment when the editorial board was discussing a project about our field's history, such a proposal should be sent to us. The synergy of the two projects was partially a happy coincidence, but it also reflects museum educators’ interest in understanding our histories and how they affect our past. Busy with the constant flow of creating programs and administrative work, many of us are eager to find moments to reflect on the past impacts the future. The articles collected here convincingly argue that engagement with our past can and must inform our future.

One of the questions that this special issue raises is where and when the history of museum education begins. For many North American educators, the origins of museum education are intimately linked to John Cotton Dana at the Newark Museum in New Jersey.¹ His innovative approach to outreach and community work has made him a natural starting point for many museum educators seeking an origin for our profession. But might we identify an origin elsewhere, for example with the founding of education departments? Or could we instead trace it to the invention of the docent in the early twentieth century?² Alternatively should we look to the shift of the museum as Temple of Art to what the Germans call a Lernort, a place of learning, that took place in the mid-twentieth century?³

While any of these moments provide a reasonable starting point for the history of museum education, we could convincingly extend our search further back, arguing that the emergence of our profession is coeval with the birth of the museum itself. This is not a radical suggestion, but it is one that has been much debated. Museum education professor George E. Hein has, for example, argued that a truly democratic educational ideal of the museum was only possible in the newly founded United States.⁴ Still, many scholars have contended that the opening up of once-private (often aristocratic) collections to the public in Europe marks the start of the modern museum. Seen in this way, the origin of the museum is inherently linked to educational goals, to the belief that the public should have access to works of art, even if eighteenth-century concepts of access and public differ from ours today.⁵

The museum educator, curator, and theorist Nora Sternfeld has recently reminded us that the birth of the modern museum can arguably be linked to the French Revolution.⁶ The opening of the Louvre in Paris in 1793 marked a dramatic democratization of access to art, when the possessions of the former royal family were transferred to the public and made accessible. Sternfeld suggests that the Louvre's place in the history of modern museums highlight a tension within the institutions that continues to this day.⁷ On the one hand, the museum emerged as part of nationalistic, colonialist display of power, a point that museum historian Bénédicte Savoy has recently revived in relation to the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.⁸ But on the other hand, the act of making once-private art objects the property of and accessible to all citizens marked a radical critique of power and claim to access for all. For Sternfeld, the birth of the modern museum is inexorably tied to a democratic impulse that she wishes to reclaim for the museum. If this is the case, then museums are simultaneously built on power (colonialist, nationalist, etc.) and a critical and deep-seated critique of that power. Modern notions of museum education, such as the critique of power, access for all, and even collective meaning-making, thus defined one of the earliest museums in the world.⁹

Despite Stenfeld's suggestions that the Louvre was the first museum, the Belvedere in Vienna can more securely claim this title, opening in 1781, more than a decade before the Louvre.¹⁰ And the explicit desire to educate was as a founding mission of the Belvedere. Its first curator, Christian von Mechel, wrote that the collection should be understood as a Lehrmittelsammlung (collection for learning) aimed at teaching a “visible history of art.”¹¹ For Mechel, the museum should teach people the history of art, a goal he supported in his gallery guide Verzeichniss der Gemälde der Kaiserlich Königlichen Bilder Gallerie in Wien (Directory of the Paintings of the Imperial Royal Painting Collection in Vienna). Eschewing the traditional, long, descriptive texts, Mechel chose to write short entries that helped direct visitors to look at the paintings, with the goal of having them look closely and for extended periods. The guide was designed to be used while at the museum and not as a substitute for a visit, the more common format at the time. It received praise for helping the uninitiated understand the works on display and the history of art. His model of display aimed at helping teach the public the history of art became famous throughout Europe, held up as the ideal display of art for didactic purposes and inspired installations and texts in many other museums, including the Louvre, the Altes Museum, and in Kassel, Germany. Thus, at the very core of the first modern museum lay an educational mandate, even including a gallery guide.¹²

Of course, the definition and understanding of what education meant in the late eighteenth century differed greatly from how museum educators conceive of their work today. Certainly, Mechlen's desire to create Lehrmittelsammlung smacks of the kind of social control that defined Vienna under Empress Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II.¹³ And one cannot ignore its location in a royal palace, a space that embodied the power of the monarchy. As historian Tony Bennet has argued, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century museums conceived of education as a mechanism of social control as much as a right to access culture for all citizens.¹⁴ The educational goals so closely linked to the founding of the first museums undeniably require unpacking and close study. The shifting definition of education and its relationship to power, colonialism, nationalism, among other issues cannot be glossed over in an attempt to write an overarching narrative of the field. It holds true, however, that the first public museum was expressly dedicated to an educational ideal. Indeed, many of the debates in early museums echo current discussions taking place in education departments. And many scholars of the history of museums discuss topics that we today would define as falling under museum education, from the museum as a center for learning, to the value and kinds of texts in the galleries, to the use of copies (like today's hands-on objects) meant to aid in educational discussions.

One particularly resonant debate took place in Berlin surrounding the definition and goals of education within the museum. The Altes Museum, designed by the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and created on the orders of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm II, opened to the public in 1830. According to the museum's architect and its first director, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the museum should “first delight, then instruct.”¹⁵ When it came time to install the galleries, one of the foremost German humanist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, was invited to be part of the deliberation. For Humboldt, the museum was first and foremost a space of aesthetic engagement, and only second a place for learning. As a result, Humboldt forbade the instillation of plaster casts in the museum, arguing that only originals had the quality necessary to astound the viewer.¹⁶ While Humboldt did not reject the role of the museum in teaching art history, his interest lay more in supporting an aesthetic experience for the visitors. Although the debates in the Altes Museum are rarely considered part of museum education's past, they echo discussions many educators will recognize. From the role of plaster casts and reproductions for teaching purposes to the relationship of “learning” vs. “experience” in the museum, early museum debates set the stage for education departments in later decades.¹⁷

I do not wish to claim here a simple origin point for all museum education. Although the first museums are often said to be art museums, other categories of museums have their own history that intersect with the story I have told here, but also diverge and develop differently.¹⁸ Given the variety of museums that exist today, from science centers, to historic homes, to literary museums, a unified history of the field could never do our past justice. Other histories might begin with the Wunderkammer as the origin of the science museum, or with early libraries as early predecessors to the literary museum. And the histories of gender, race, and colonialism, among other factors are written into our past and deserve attention. In addition, museum located in Asia, Africa, and South America certainly have their own histories that do not always follow the European-North American model. Still, these two examples of the earliest museums in Europe do suggest that the western concept of the museum developed from an educational impulse. As a result, museum education can rightly claim its role as the central and founding principle upon which museums were built.

As an educator who worked for many years in art museums, the history I have outlined here is one informed by my own work. It is one that I believe makes a strong argument for our central role in the museum from its inception. But one of the great values of this journal is that it brings together educators from all varieties of museums, allowing us all to expand our understanding of the field beyond our own work. Carissa and the authors she has invited offer insights into these complex histories. The articles collected here explore the influence of these histories on our work today, often in as-of-yet unrecognized ways. Through a wide range of studies, spanning art, science, children's, and a Jewish museum, the articles highlight the complex and varied histories of museum education in the United States. They offer us a chance to consider how this educational imperative of the museum developed and manifested itself in various ways over the course of the twentieth century in America, and they invite us to consider the histories of our field in all their complexities.

Disclosure statement

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.