school as museum, museum as school.

In yesterday's post, I quoted from Klemm's book on European Schools in the 19th century about the Local School Museum. Object teaching is important in engaging children in learning, helping them to have a sense of their own heritage, and given the right objects, and right curatorial use of those objects establishes a sense of direction for cultural development. Museums are the repository in which a sense of our own future can be found. Any proposition that does not allow for the past is offered in error. As I've stated before in the blog, 2 points form a line, but if you understand the order in which the points were laid, a vector is formed. Children thrust into high technology without a foundation from the long history of human culture will have little or no sense of what's most important for our development and have no sense of what's most precious from our past.

The video above shows Henry Ford Academy, a charter school built on the grounds of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. I visited there very briefly in 2010 for a meeting of the hand tribe, and to attend the Detroit Maker Faire. This video shows how the HFI design thinking concept works. Imagine having the Henry Ford Museum as the launching point for your problem solving endeavors?  If museums are not consulted in our cultural experimentation, how can we possibly avoid the excesses and failures of the past?

Make, fix, create... help others to do so.