ABSTRACT

Th is quotation by John Dewey, the closing comments from A Common Faith and those words inscribed upon his tombstone at the University of Vermont, also serves as the defi ning statement for the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina. Founded in 1977 as an archives/display area within the university’s McKissick Museum building, the Museum of Education was originally conceived to fulfi ll a rather conservative mission of preserving documents and artifacts of educational life in South Carolina (i.e., the conventional museum roles of collection, conservation, and exhibition). Roberts (1997) maintains that “many if not most museums have broken from their object-based traditions and have become idea-experience-, and narrative-based institutions-forums for the negotiation and the renegotiation of meaning” (p. 147) and, upon moving in 1985 to a 3,000 square foot facility housed in a portion of the education building at University of South Carolina, the museum began developing a more interpretive, critical voice and an active sense of social agency for the understanding of history of education in South Carolina. By its second decade, aft er establishing itself as a leading archives for material culture related to the fi eld of South Carolina education, the museum continued to “conserve and transmit” the lessons of the past but, more importantly, guided by Dewey’s comments the facility sought to rectify and expand the examination of educational beliefs and values of our state and region.