Page 100 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

84 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

mounted extravagant displays of their technologies, arts, trade and industry.
The Palais de la Découverte was built for the Paris International Exposition in
1937 and the London Science Museum was originally part of the South
Kensington Museum, London, established using items from the Great Exhib-
ition of 1851. The Deutsches Museum was intended to celebrate German scien-
tific and technological achievement, and was funded by both government and
industry. It was the inspiration for the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry,
which was established by the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company and
opened during the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–4. As early as the 1940s sec-
tions of the museum were sponsored and even produced by industry (Butler
1992 :52–3).
Close connections with industry, commerce and government have meant that
such museums tend toward glorifying technical and scientific achievement at the
expense of critical perspectives (Hudson 1975: 105–6; Butler 1992: 52–3). At the
same time they aim to popularize science, not just to increase public appreci-
ation of science but to realize the potential for scientific achievement amongst
populations with little scientific education. The San Francisco Exploratorium
was influenced by these museums but its agenda was, in theory at least,
more radical. For Frank Oppenheimer, interactive science exhibits had an
explicitly emancipatory function. He stated the purpose of the Exploratorium
as follows:
The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to
believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people
have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the
physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If
we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.
(cited in Hein 1986: xv)
Oppenheimer was responding partly to a 1960s scepticism about science and
partly to what he saw as a withdrawal from politics into mysticism. Con-
sequently the Exploratorium excluded anything to do with parascience, the
occult, extrasensory perception and so on, despite their popularity in San
Francisco at the time. The Exploratorium was also intended to educate through
play. This approach to education was shaped not just by its science museum
predecessors but also by Oppenheimer’s teaching experience and politics.
Blacklisted in the 1940s because of his brief membership of the Communist
Party in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer had become a cattle rancher and then a
high school science teacher in Colorado. There he developed an interactive and
experiential approach to science education (Hein 1986: 11). Such an approach
derives, if indirectly, from various progressive theories of education which I will
discuss in the next section.