An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century
Author(s)
Skramstad, Harold
Abstract
Many Americans are seeking out groups and institutions that can offer order, authority, and criteria that go beyond the imperatives of individualism, and one institution that has successfully provided these needs is the American museum. Museums have helped shape the American experience in the past, and they have the potential to play an even more aggressive role in shaping American life in the future. They offer a powerful educational model that can help redesign and reform American education, and they can be important centers of community development and renewal. However, to accomplish these two things, museums must engage the world with a spirit of activism and openness far beyond what they are used to. They will have to reexamine and rethink some of the most fundamental assumptions they hold about what they do and how they do it. They will also have to reclaim the sense of bold entrepreneurship and experimentation that characterized the earliest days of the museum movement in America.
