Social Inclusion and museums
Euan W MacKie, FSA, Honorary Research Fellow at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, publisheda letter in The Times on 24 March 2006 concerning the Government's use of museums as a tool of social policy was detracting from their core purpose: ‘
'I support efforts to widen the range of people who visit museums’, he wrote, ‘but why ruin a good museum when, if the aim is a good and popular one, something like an Institute for Social Enlightenment could be built and — not being responsible for the material heritage — filled with informative displays about all manner of contemporary issues? The real danger to museums of these new ideologies of relevance and social inclusiveness is that they provide an intellectual justification for staff to abandon their traditional roles as researchers, custodians of priceless historical evidence and informed educators for the much less demanding ones of children’s entertainers and propagandists for specific topical causes.’'
'I support efforts to widen the range of people who visit museums’, he wrote, ‘but why ruin a good museum when, if the aim is a good and popular one, something like an Institute for Social Enlightenment could be built and — not being responsible for the material heritage — filled with informative displays about all manner of contemporary issues? The real danger to museums of these new ideologies of relevance and social inclusiveness is that they provide an intellectual justification for staff to abandon their traditional roles as researchers, custodians of priceless historical evidence and informed educators for the much less demanding ones of children’s entertainers and propagandists for specific topical causes.’'
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