History of Education Society

Proposed: A National Museum of Education

Author(s): Walter O. Krumbiegel
Source: History of Education Journal, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer, 1956), pp. 152-156
Published by: History of Education Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3659126 .
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 152 HISTORY OF EDUCATION JOURNAL

PROPOSED: A NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EDUCATION

Walter 0. Krumbiegel

Last year an article in the New York Times discussed the

phenomenal growth of the company museum. The article pointed
out that there were fewer than ten such museums in the United
States before the first World War, and that there are several hun-
dred today. One of the museums mentioned, the John Woodman
Higgins Armory Museum of the Worcester Pressed Steel Company,
is reputed to have the second largest collection of armor in the
world, the Tower of London having the largest. This museum, only
twenty-five years old, has had about 265,000 visitors. The Corning
Glass Center has had over 2,000,000 visitors in less than five
years. Company museums, according to this article, are now used
"for designing, research, legal and patent studies, sales training,
tours, and institutional advertising."' The company museum is, of
course, only one type in the country today. Coleman in his three
volume work on the American museum mentioned museums which
deal with the Confederacy, whaling, Red Cross service, numisma-
tics, the work of the Federal government, and golf.2 There is a
baseball museum at Cooperstown, N. Y. and a football museum at
New Brunswick, N. J. Then there are, of course, the great mu-
seums of art, history, and science. Coleman counted 2,480 mu-
seums in 1939. 3 Nevertheless, there does not appear to be a
museum of education. Some history museums, it is true, have ac-
quired school material of historic value and held exhibits using
these materials to prove a point. These materials and efforts,
however beneficial to the cause of education, appear to be scattered.
In view of the history, magnitude, and importance of education, it
would seem that this endeavor of man deserves a museum commen-
surate with its importance. The proposal is therefore advanced
that a national museum of education be established.
The museum visualized here is a national museum, compar-
able to the great art, history, industry, and science museums. It is
a museum about education, concerned with the history of education

l Carl Spielvogel, "Something There for Everyone: Tourist, Researcher,

Salesman." New York Times, (April 1, 1956).
Lawrence Vail Coleman, The Museum in America: A.Critical Study.
(Washington, D. C., The American Association of Museums, 1939), I, 121.
3 Ibid., 18.
 PROPOSED: A NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EDUCATION 153

and the contemporary problems of education. The museum con-

tains materials from primitive, eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Roman,
medieval, and modern societies related to this field. The emphasis
of the museum is, of course, upon American education. The mu-
seum contains original and reproductions of American classrooms
of 1650, 1750, 1850, and 1950. The museum also contains settings
and materials of contemporary European schools. Dioramas rep-
resenting significant educational developments deck the walls: the
Hebrew scribe teaching his pupils, the Egyptian boy learning his
trade, the Greek palestra, the Roman ludus, the cathedral school,
the medieval university lecture hall, the classrooms of da Feltre,
of an early Jesuit school, a classroom of one of La Salle's schools,
the inside of a vernacular school, models of an early academy,
Hecker's Realschule, and Basedow's Philanthropinum, models of
Pestalozzi's schools at Burgdorf and Yverdon, a Lancasterian class-
room, an early Kindergarten, one of the first Russian manual
training shops, Dewey's elementary school in Chicago, and the Casa
dei Bambini of Maria Montessori. On the walls also are large
photo murals of the title pages of the great proposals and the laws
which affected education during its long history. In the show cases
and cabinets are special exhibits of writing materials, report cards,
teachers' bells, hickory switches, maps and globes used by teach-
ers in the past. Examples of children's school work throughout
the ages fill other cases. Some cabinets contain models of con-
temporary school buildings. There are also displays dealing with
the contemporary methods of teaching reading, writing, arithmetic,
history, geography, science, health, music, safety, and auto driving.
In the halls are statues of the great educational philosophers and
reformers. The materials for such a museum exist, and the list
mentioned here could be revised or enlarged by any historian of
education. The preparation of the exhibits, of course, requires
research, one of the functions of a large museum.
Museums have several functions. They acquire and preserve
objects, educate the public, besides offering opportunities for re-
search.4 The potential value of a museum of education becomes
clearer when these functions are related to education as that term
is considered here. As indicated earlier, the materials of educa-
tional history seem scattered and are probably few in number.
Many such objects, no doubt, have been lost or will be lost unless
attention is focused upon their acquisition and preservation. The

i Theodore L. Low, The Museum as a Social Instrument. Published at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art for the American Association of Museums,
1942, 20.
154 HISTOR Y OF ED UCA TION JO URNA L

special collections related to education, such as report cards,

samplers, school certificates assembled by private collectors,
could easily disappear through heirs who do not appreciate their
significance. A note of urgency is entered here. Some European
museums seem to have been quite alert in collecting a considerable
amount of pedagogical material. Possibly, a preliminary step in
founding a museum of education would be to locate and catalog
such material now in European and American museums and in
private hands.
The function of the museum which seems to have received the
greatest attention by "museists" in the present century is public
enlightenment. Here, too, a museum of education could make a
significant contribution. There has been a persistent concern in
professional circles over what the general public knows about the
work of the schools. Several organizations, both lay and profes-
sional, have made serious efforts, of which the annual school visi-
tation program is a conspicuous example, to inform the public of
that work. Efforts are also being made to inform the pupils in the
schools of the character of education. In a country where educa-
tional policy, especially on the elementary and secondary level, is
determined to some extent by laymen, such efforts seem desirable.
A museum of education would offer an additional opportunity for
laymen to learn about education. Wittlin has pointed out that mu-
seum exhibits convey more facts to adults and children in a shorter
time than the spoken or printed word; that exhibits can present
many facts simultaneously, in a synthesis, thus bringing out their
significance and relationship more clearly; and that exhibits stimu-
late the powers of observation, logical thinking, responsibility, and
imagination of the people.5 The thought that the general public and
lay educational leaders would more likely learn more from a mu-
seum than from books on education is probably not too farfetched.
It is hoped in this connection that local and state museums of edu-
cation will also be established, and that existing museums give
more attention to the problems of education, so that significant
educational exhibits will be within the reach of all. Also, it seems
within reason to hope that such a museum would create more public
interest in education and possibly stimulate some non-educator to
give serious attention to educational problems. Not all educational
reformers have come from the ranks. Children would benefit from
the museum proposed here in two ways: the exhibits would give
them a better understanding and appreciation of the nature of past

5 Alma S. Wittlin, The Museum:

Its History and Its Task in Education.
(London: Routledge and Kegan, Paul., Ltd., 1949), 188.
 PROPOSED: A NATIONAL MUSEUM OF EDUCATION 155

and present education, and the teacher education work of the mu-
seum would provide them with better teachers.
A national museum of education would offer further oppor-
tunities for teacher education and training. Certainly a close re-
lationship exists between a course in the history of education and a
museum which presents the visual evidence of that history. Identi-
cal aims exist here. Furthermore, the materials connected with
schools of different cultures would by their very nature under-
score the social relationship of education. Not only would the
historical background of contemporary educational problems be
presented to the critical gaze of teachers new and old, but also the
various solutions, real and hypothical, of those problems, insofar
as those solutions lend themselves to exhibition, would be shown.
Comparative education could help here by presenting displays of
work in other countries. From all of these exhibits, teachers
could learn more about their craft.
The museum considered here would not only encourage gen-
eral educational research, but also point up (the words open up
almost occur to one) research opportunities in the history of edu-
cation dealing with objects. Involved in such research are prob-
lems of locating items, establishing their authenticity, their social
relationship, and their educational significance. Opportunities for
research are obviously connected with the reproductions of the
dioramas mentioned earlier. Such research would naturally call
upon the disciplines developed in other fields such as archeology,
anthropology, and architecture and further our alliance with the
great stream of scholarship. The museum would contain a special-
ized library dealing with the history of education and special works
connected with the exhibits. It would also publish reports of its
researches and services. In connection with teacher education and
research, the museum would, to some extent, supplement the work
of schools of education. The relationship between the museum and
schools of education presumably would be the same as the relation-
ship of the other museums to the schools whose fields they repre-
sent. The larger purpose of the museum would, however, remain
public enlightenment.
Acceptance of the assumption that a museum of education
would benefit the American people leads to problems connected
with founding such an institution. Involved here are the matters of
sponsorship, size, location, organization, administration, and the
crucial matter of finance.6 It would seem wise in this connection
6
Arthur C. Parker, A Manual for History Museums. New York State His-
torical Association Series, edited by Dixon Ryan Fox (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1935), No. III, 23-89.
156 HISTORY OF EDUCATION JOURNAL

to call upon the thoughts of our experienced "museists" who have

been responsible for making the American museum a significant
instrument of education. Possibly a first step toward founding such
a museum would be a meeting between "museists," educators, and
historians of education to explore these problems.
The museum envisioned here seeks to acquire and preserve
significant items of past and present education and put them to the
uses partially explored above. The museum would refer to all
education-public, private, parochial, elementary, secondary, col-
legiate, essentialist and progressive. Such a museum could be
supported by educators of all philosophic persuasions. The museum
could be a means for improving education for all. It is likely that
the benefits from such a museum would equal those now derived
from the present museums in the United States.