Statement by the 

 Secretary 



I. Michael Heyman 



Before I took up my responsibilities as Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution in September 1994, I had enjoyed 35 

 years as a member of an academic community: the University 

 of California at Berkeley, with 10 as chancellor. One of the 

 questions I am regularly asked is whether I miss the world of 

 students and the opportunity to shape their education. 



The answer is yes, I do. I miss the company of undergraduates 

 and graduates. For someone of my generation, teaching the 

 young is a way to touch the future. But I am quick to add 

 that I have not left the world of education; I have simply 

 exchanged one kind of educational institution for another. 

 James Smithson's mandate to dedicate the Smithsonian to 

 "the increase and diffusion of knowledge" well over 150 years 

 ago keeps this great complex of museums and research 

 institutes focused on goals that are at the heart of education. 



There are differences, of course. Much of the education that 

 happens within the Smithsonian universe can be described as 

 informal rather than formal. We are not a degree-granting 

 institution, nor do we shepherd the young through the stages 

 of classroom experience from elementary through high school. 

 We present to the public, both school age and adult, a wealth 

 of programs that represent and reinforce the excitement of 

 learning about the human and the natural worlds. We have no 

 alumni because there is no fixed starting or ending point to 

 what we offer. In recent years, however, the Smithsonian has 

 taken more and more interest in making its resources directly 

 available to America's schools. In the last decades of this 

 century, our nation has come to recognize a need to find new 

 ways to support the education of our children and to help 

 prepare them for a rapidly changing world. The Smithsonian 

 has developed educational materials and programs based on 

 actual objects and other primary resources that, in effect, take 

 our museums and research institutes to the classroom. We feel 



we have something to offer schools that are special to our own 

 learning environment. 



Traditionally, education has relied heavily on texts and 

 lectures, questions and discussions. Words are at the core of 

 the experience. Object-based education focuses the learning 

 experience more on artifacts and primary documents in a 

 manner that taps children's diverse learning styles while 

 stimulating interest and providing a deeper understanding of 

 the subject. As one teacher put it, "Even young children can 

 often be helped to understand quite complex concepts when 

 they can discover them concretely manifested in objects." 



One Smithsonian project for a schoolchild based on this 

 approach is "Of Kayaks and Ulus," which was created largely 

 by the National Museum of Natural History for grades 7 

 through 10. The project, originally presented in a kit but soon 

 available on the Internet, involves Bering Sea Eskimos and 

 emphasizes the journals and collections of a famous 

 nineteenth-century Smithsonian naturalist, Edward Nelson. 



The kit contains a teachers' guide, which suggests, for 

 instance, that students view "mystery" slides of objects from 

 the Eskimo culture, then ponder how these objects were made 

 and used. Further discussion usually elicits hypotheses about 

 the environment in which the people who made these items 

 lived, the natural resources they depended upon, their ability 

 as craftspeople, and similar topics. After this process, the 

 srudents learn that all the objects, and many others, are in a 

 collection at the Smithsonian amassed by Nelson. Then they 

 are introduced to reproductions of Nelson's letters, journals, 

 photographs, drawings, and field notes. 



There are many other examples of similar projects 

 developed by the Smithsonian. One is a popular science 

 curriculum featuring hands-on experiments for students in 

 grades 1 through 6. Created by the National Science Resources 



