ABSTRACT
David Murray, a Scottish archaeologist, describes the museum’s chief philosophical orientation toward its work during this “Golden Age” of the public museum, as dedicated to “scientific description, classification, and explanation”. In the United States, museum’s teleological agenda was generated in part by the notion of accountability and the desire to measure educational “outputs” for those who funded museums and exhibitions. At the level of pedagogy, visitor studies has helped reshape the notion of mass education by questioning and then rejecting the notion of a universal approach to learning in the museum setting. Social scientists museum historians and semioticians sought to use the museum as an area of research to elucidate questions regarding socialization, ideology, and the relationship of culture to structure. The New Museology puts forward scholarship that both heralds and argues for changes in the core philosophy that had undergirded the Enlightenment museum model and shaped the policies and procedures of the “modern museum” of the early twentieth century.
