Museums matter, and I’m not just saying that because my job depends on it. For better or worse, the educational value of museums has always been explained in qualitative terms: they teach students new and intriguing ideas; they get them out of the classroom; they are just plain fun. These sorts of declarations have a sense of truthiness about them. I will go so far as to call them truisms — statements that are so self-evidently true, we don’t feel the need to explain them. If, however, you have ever had to tell your family that you no longer want to be a lawyer but a museum curator, then you know the value of being able to explain such statements. I’ve become an expert myself.
Museums matter and we have more concrete evidence than mere truisms. In 2011, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Northwestern Arkansas. It was the first major art museum to be built in the United States in the last 40 years. A hefty endowment allowed the museum to pay all the expenses involved in school tours. That’s right, teachers from around the region could bring their classes to the museum for free. Suddenly, there was a world-class art museum in their own backyard — and the doors were wide open. Needless to say, teachers took advantage of this and in the first two years the museum received over 500 applications for their free tour program. K-12 teachers weren’t the only ones thrilled at the prospect of a new art museum. Researchers at the University of Arkansas, recognizing the opportunity to evaluate the benefit of school tours on such a large scale, set up a study to do just that.
In 2012-13, nearly 11,000 students and 500 teachers were surveyed about their experience visiting the Crystal Bridges Museum. These students came from 123 different schools across Arkansas. Among the many parameters this study tested, I want to highlight two in particular. It’s one thing to be able to determine how many facts students can retain, and this was one element of the study. There are, however, other skills that are less easily quantifiable but often more important, like the level of one’s tolerance or empathy. Traits that seem to be utterly lacking in the leading Republican presidential candidates, are nevertheless important skills for children to learn. Recognizing this, the University of Arkansas researchers included surveys in their study that attempted to measure these fundamental virtues. Guiding these attempts was a central question: does going to a museum make students more tolerant and empathetic?
Spoiler: it does.
Here’s how they came to this conclusion. In order to evaluate their tolerance, the students were given a survey before and after their visit. In this survey, the students were asked to note the level to which they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements like “people who disagree with my point of view bother me” and “I appreciate hearing views different from my own.” In the same vein as this, a survey was administered to measure the students’ historic empathy — the capacity to empathize and understand the lives and struggles of people from a different time and place. Once again, students filled out a questionnaire before and after their tour, indicating the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I have a good understanding of how early Americans thought and felt” and “I can imagine what life was like 100 years ago.” The results were simply fantastic. The researchers found that both the tolerance and historical empathy of the students increased significantly after their visit to the museum.
These results surprise most people. It’s one thing to find that a museum tour increases students’ critical thinking skills (it does) or that students are able to retain more factual information (they do). But, how is it that a single hour in a museum can increase a child’s capacity for tolerance and empathy beyond his/her immediate time and place? The answer, to me, is rather simple. When you walk through the doors of a museum you are immediately transported to a different time and place. Whether looking at the Mona Lisa or great grandma Mona’s butter churn, you are forced to deal with the truth that what you know and understand is not all there is to know and understand in the world. People have come before youv—vand will come after youv—vwho have experienced love, hate, triumph and loss. You are confronted — whether you want to or not — with the entire spectrum of human experience and it can be a humbling experience. “Travel,” as Mark Twain once wrote, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” A visit to your nearest museum is the cheapest way to travel to a foreign land. Indeed, there is nothing more foreign to us than the past.
The results from a study in Arkansas should matter a great deal to us in Lake County, California. You see, this study revealed that across the board — from critical thinking to tolerance and empathy — students from low-income families and/or rural areas received greater benefits from attending the museum tour than students from less disadvantaged backgrounds. We’re not talking about 5 or 10 percent more, but two to three times more! With 25 percent of Lake County residents living under the poverty line as of 2010 (that’s 10 percent over the state average), a trip to the museum can mean a world of difference for so many of our students. This is why we at the Lower Lake Schoolhouse Museum and the Historic Courthouse Museum pay for all transportation costs involved in class tours. We want students to come and learn and to become more tolerant and empathetic adults.
Of course museums matter, but perhaps they matter more than we thought.
Tony Pierucci is Curator of Lake County Museums
Historic Courthouse Museum
707-263-4555
255 N. Main St. Lakeport, CA
Open Wed-Sat 10-4; Sun 12-4
Lower Lake Schoolhouse Museum
707-995-3565
16435 Main St. Lower Lake, CA
Open Wed-Sat. 11-4
If you would like to read more about what the researchers found, visit http://educationnext.org/the-educational-value-of-field-trips/
