Progressive Museum Practice: John Dewey and Democracy

In his fortieth anniversary commemoration of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts and Decoration in 1937, John Dewey wrote confidently about the development of museums as educational institutions. As Dewey argued, “[o]ne of the most striking features of recent American culture has been the rapid growth of museums in all lines, artistic, commercial and industrial; of natural history, anthropology and antiquities.” Dewey explained that it “has become generally recognized” that museums “occupy as necessary a place in popular education as do public libraries,” arguing that “[v]ision of [museums’] educational function has kept pace with their material expansion.” In general, Dewey contended, a “museum that is directed toward educational ends has to meet problems that are very different from those which existed when they were for the most part but collections of curious, interesting and possibly beautiful objects, or were collections of historical mementos.”¹

In a book published seventy-five years after Dewey’s commemoration, George Hein argues that museum educators should rededicate themselves to progressive thinking about their institutions. His book, Progressive Museum Practice, describes an explicitly educational and democratic tradition for American museum institutions, and it places Dewey’s philosophy at the center of this tradition. Hein emphasizes the educational and political dimensions of American museum practice from Charles Willson Peale’s 18th century museum in Philadelphia to constructivist experiments in museum education in San Francisco’s Exploratorium in the early 2000s. Reflecting on this practice, Hein argues that Dewey’s philosophy, and particularly Dewey’s thinking on education, can help contemporary museum educators to develop more progressive approaches to exhibition pedagogy.

Hein recommends Dewey’s view on pedagogy as intimately related to politics. Acknowledging that “[i]nteractivity and experimentation are common in science museums and children’s museums” and increasingly common in other kinds of museums, Hein describes the trend toward “doing” in museum spaces as exemplifying only “the immediate practical, pedagogic component of Dewey’s educational agenda.”² “For Dewey,” Hein argues, “the pedagogic aspects of progressive education were necessarily linked with the social goals of progressivism: the effort to improve economic and social conditions for the poor, acceptance of immigration as a potentially positive contribution to society, and recognition of the need for a communitarian spirit for building a strong democratic society.”³ With this contrast in mind, Hein argues that museum exhibition designers have much to learn from Dewey as they seek to connect museum pedagogy with progressive social goals.

Given its purpose, its intended audience, and the complexity of the historical tradition it seeks to establish, Progressive Museum Practice’s eight chapters are necessarily more oriented toward invoking, rather than examining, Dewey’s philosophy. That said, those who specialize in study of Dewey’s life and work will be attracted to Hein’s chapters on “Educational Theory” (1), “John Dewey and Museums” (2), and “John Dewey and Albert Barnes” (5). Because it builds on Hein’s study of Barnes and his involvement in the Barnes Foundation, and because it engages the secondary literature on Dewey, specialists will be especially attracted to the last of these chapters, which emphasizes the intellectual quality of Dewey and Barnes’s friendship. In general, Hein writes as Barnes’s apologist, defending this wealthy and irascible art educator against those who would dismiss him as a mere eccentric. With respect to Barnes’s relationship with Dewey, Hein goes somewhat further, asserting Barnes’s central influence on Dewey’s thinking about aesthetics. Hein castigates philosophers (including Abraham Kaplan, Philip Jackson, and Sidney Hook) as well as art historians who have de-emphasized Dewey’s intellectual debts to Barnes. Stressing the commitment to democratic education in the arts Barnes first demonstrated in his programs for his factory’s workers, Hein argues that it was Barnes’s experiments in art education that were especially valuable to Dewey. Referencing Dewey’s reticence about aesthetics in the early decades of the twentieth century, Hein argues that “Barnes provided the key...