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| done about the sights that lie below the surface of nature - the host of normally inaccessible natural phenomena that have been and are being discovered that require special instrumentation or environments in order to be observed? Classrooms and even television films afford severely limited possibilities for showing these sights. Sightseeing through these media resembles sightings from the windows of trains that are unstoppable, irreversible, and dominated more by the smells, sounds, and motions of the train than by the landscape. Sightseeing is invariably unsatisfactory where the main concern is a rush toward a destination or a need to catch the next train. The best kind of sightseeing involves some exploration and the freedom to decide what not to investigate and where to linger. The more one can become involved with the sights through touching, feeling, smelling, and activity, the more rewarding it can be. It is nice to be able to linger and backtrack. It helps to be able to exchange remarks with one’s friend and even with strangers. Quite generally, museums should be able to display many of the less accessible sights, and they can do so on an appropriate scale. The Exploratorium certainly does provide this kind of participative sightseeing. In fact, it is impossible to lead a group through it on a guided tour. If one starts off with a group, one soon finds oneself alone, other people having stayed behind to play with or investigate one or another of the displays of the intended tour. Museums can, in addition, present a broad view. The need for interdisciplinary survey material has been felt at all levels of instruction and there have been repeated attempts to devise curricula for this purpose. It seems to me quite possible that museums can assume the responsibility for organizing the material that fulfills this need and that they can do so more effectively than an academic course. Updated museums would then be able to relieve the schools of an obligation that has been thrust upon them but that they are not in the best position to fulfill. | There is something of a contradiction in the notion of an interdisciplinary course. Students in a course usually feel dissatisfied unless they have acquired some special skill or some new way of handling or understanding an idea. But the disciplines involved in doing and understanding physics, for example, are quite different from those involved in chemistry or biology. An interdisciplinary course therefore is likely to be a mere juxtaposition of these different disciplines and not a fusion of them. It is true that one can give an interdisciplinary survey, but a survey implies that one takes in many components of the scene at once and is a far cry from a course that meets for one hour on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 36 weeks. Survey courses usually depend too crucially on the inspiration and personality of a particular instructor to make them effective in the general situation. In a museum, on the other hand, both interdisciplinary scenery and interconnecting pathways can be laid out. Individuals visit museums in different fashions, but frequently they first survey what is there and later return to selected sections to become more deeply involved. Their second look is more deliberate and enables the visitor to appreciate the details of the exhibits as well as their relationship to one another and to the general landscape. By presenting a multiplicity of examples, in a variety of contacts, of an abstraction such as wave motion or energy or randomness, the museum can build up the visitor’s intuitive familiarity with such concepts. The teaching and learning that takes place in museums is obviously not restricted to display techniques. Exhibits can serve as props to be used in conjunction with more analytical courses, and lectures and available material can be used by school classes and individual students for special study projects. Groups of exhibits can be filmed and demonstrated on local television to a large audience in a way that not only explains ideas in detail, but that invites this audience to come to the museum and interact with the very same demonstrations that they see on film. Furthermore, because of a looser scheduling in | ||