My task is to welcome you to this collaboration, and to acknowledge that something very important is happening here. Whenever we speak about the library and the museum, and whenever we consider the power of institutions to address and respect the integrity of human intellect, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are in the room. And, perhaps like them, I think that communities, cultures, civil societies, families, schools all need to be challenged in order to understand what they must do to enhance individual human becoming.
You are creating exactly that kind of challenge here, against the odds -- and across state lines as well. Your project is grounded on the idea of the cultural institution as a family forum, or as a laboratory where voices can express the possible, capture its story, and in telling it to others, com into its ownership. And you appear to seek an equal ownership for all of the family members, who have so much to learn from each other when they are mutually in engagement with their common world.
But there is your challenge, isn't it? It has several parts: Overcoming the isolations of experience, separations, insularities, anxieties, and distances among us. Creating the language of observation. Building accord on what we want to have happen. Finding the courage to consider the mutual unknown. This is exactly what cultural institutions exist for: to manage cognitive challenges by creating good processes and educative structures, recognizing good questions when they appear, and finding the personal story that needs to be told. We are in need of such personal stories ....

Here is a recent news item you may have seen:

From The New York Times, February 16, 2000, page 1:
A NEWER, LONELIER CROWD EMERGES IN INTERNET STUDY
By John Markoff

San Francisco, February 15 -- The nation's obsession with the Internet is causing many Americans to spend less time with friends and family, less time shopping in stores and more time working at home after hours, according to one of the first large-scale survey of the societal impact of the Internet.
In short, "the more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings," said Norman Nie, a political scientist at Stanford University who was the principal investigator for the study.
Mr. Nie asserted that the Internet was creating a broad new wave of social isolation in the United States, raising the specter of an atomized world without human contact or emotion. ...
"No one is asking the obvious questions about what kind of world we are going to live in when the Internet becomes ubiquitous," Mr. Nie said. No one asked these questions with the advent of the automobile, which led to unplanned suburbanization, or with the rise of television, which led to the decline of our political parties."
"We hope we can give society a chance to talk through some of these issues before the changes take place," he said. Americans overwhelmingly use e-mail as their most common Internet activity, according to the Stanford researchers.
Moreover, the report found that most Internet users treated the network as a giant public library, albeit with a commercial tilt. ...
Some critics strongly disagree with the researchers' assertion that the Internet is leading to a new form of social isolation.
"It's true by definition that if you're spending more hours hitting the keyboard you're not spending time with other people," said Amatai Etzioni, a sociologist at George Washington University. "But people do form very strong relations over the Internet, and many of them are relations that they could not find any other way." ...

This article evokes a number of questions we encounter whenever we compare the environments of our earlier lives to the environments where we try to find ourselves today. We may feel that something is missing, or it may be lost in the tensions that define our lives:

• Tensions between our families and our work
• Tensions between feeling safe and feeling fearful
• Tensions between continuity and change.

To these tensions, we might add the observation that the values transmitted to our children may not be coming from us. These are times when the unresolvable tacit questions we are asked to live with may be, What does it mean to be a human being? What are the values of a person -- of personal acts? What does it mean now to be a human being among other human beings? We in this room may be sensitive to less identifiable, subtler erosions in public altruism. We may notice fewer opportunities for reflection and self-renewal, and more difficult connections among us for the sake of such things as a common voice, cooperation and outreach, mutual respect, and even self-respect. These erosions would be especially important to us, of course, because these -- altruism, reflection, connections, respect -- are the grounding impulses for teaching and learning, self-exploration, and confident engagement with one's life. To lose them, even a bit of them, is disheartening; and so we must seize what we have.
Here is a poem by A. R. Ammons, from his collection, Northfield Poems. Its title is "Way to Go."

  West light flat on trees:
 bird flying
 deep out in blue glass:
 uncertain wind

 stirring the leaves: this is
 the world we have:
 take it

Against the tensions and senses of loss, we take the life we have, we create communities of all kinds, and we build harbors in them: the institutions and collective settings where commonalities and stories and the mutual transmissions of cultural gifts are exchanged. These are the institutions and settings doing the formative cultural gift giving that E. J. Dionne describes as "the practical work of civil society." (Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America, E. J. Dionne, Jr., ed. Brookings Institution Press, 1998, page 12.) This phrase comes from a collection of essays devoted to understanding the ways a community has of causing or encouraging favorable things to happen.

The former senator, Bill Bradley, defines civil society in his contribution to these essays:

Civil society is the place where Americans make their home, sustain their marriages, raise their families, hang out with their friends, meet their neighbors, educate their children, worship their god. It is in the churches, schools, fraternities, community centers, labor unions, synagogues, sports leagues, PTAs, libraries, [museums, Carr adds] and barber shops. It is where opinions are expressed and refined, where views are exchanged and agreements made, where a sense of common purpose and consensus are forged. It lies apart from the realms of the market and the government, and possesses a different ethic. The market is governed by the logic of economic self-interest, while government is the domain of laws with all their coercive authority. Civil society, on the other hand, is the sphere of our most basic humanity - the personal, everyday realm that is governed by values such as responsibility, trust, fraternity, solidarity, and love. In a democratic civil society such as ours, we also put a special premium on social equality - the conviction that men and women should be measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the size of their bank accounts, the religion of their family, or the happenstance of their gender.

Bill Bradley, "America's Challenge: Revitalizing Our National Community." In Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America, edited by E. J. Dionne, Jr., Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998, pages 108-109.

We work in civil society. In the case of libraries and museums, that favorable thing we want to have happen in civil society is the critical work of creating learners, or developing families whose members are engaged with each other -- embracing each other over their mutual experiences, and for us it is also the critical wok of confirming readers and thinkers and nourishing them to move toward each other in public and private spaces.
Jean Bethke Elshtain writes, "Civil society isn't so much about problem solving as about citizen and neighbor creation." (Community Works, page 27) And learner creation, I will add; and memory creation, and future creation. As Dan Coates and Rick Santorum write in this volume, "When civil society is strong, it infuses a community with its warmth, trains its people to be good citizens, and transmits values between generations." (Community Works, page 102) This, I see, is what you are about, what you are for.
It is what you at your best do better than anyone else: you find and use the energy of the people who arrive here in the museum and the public library in order to renew and reinvent themselves, and so to renew and reinvent their communities. Your institutions recognize that every mindful person is a community's treasure. You exist in an alliance of trust and common weal with your community. The preposition is important: As I learned in my work at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, it is the institution that is not just for, but with its community, that thrives most fully. How are cultural institutions -- museums and libraries, in our case -- part of the same human motive, beyond that fundamental one of keeping things and preserving them against the threat of loss and forgetfulness? Having a museum and a library in a community is always about the community having both a present and a future. These institutions are devoted to the evidences of possible knowledge.

• They share a horizon, attending to the cognitive, educative and developmental possibilities of people over the lifespan, apart from the interests and manipulations of schools. They don't give credits or certificates. They don't graduate anyone. No bells. No recess. But they are for learning as it ought to happen: that is, in what we might call an open configuration of structures and structures-within-structures, evoking the natural continuities of cognitive experience.

• They have similar logics and patterns of organization: we can expect to find our way with reasonable amounts of attention and minimal intervention and instruction. Every public cultural setting in my experience is constructed for direct, independent entry by users, who are given articulate, logical, and public organization systems and coherent narratives of passage or process. Each institution employs professionals and others whose specific task is to consult, to direct, to facilitate learning, and to assist the user in designing an individual experience of the collection. Apart from the more or less logical systems created for access (such as catalogs and maps) the physical structures of museum and library buildings generally reflect a logical likeness or design, a continuity of discipline, topic, or material. The museum and the library are designed structures, with a logic that is, at its best, visible and coherent, unhidden, unmysterious. A setting that evokes a path that we can experience as our own path.

• In what they offer and how they offer it to us, the museum and the library are similarly laboratory-like environments: in content and power, they are potentially volatile and surprising, and they require acute attention to detail. Borrowing from John Dewey, we might say that museums and libraries are places for events that have not happened yet. Our cultural institutions are by their nature designed for cognitive experiments, for proximities and juxtapositions of images and ideas that cannot occur in any other institutions. And, in library or museum, every user's step is a form of question, from generic to specific. Because library and museum use are active and experimental, not passive, we might further say that such experiences are empirical, revealing logical connections and decisions that require direct cognitive impressions of artifacts and tools. Holding these artifacts and tools for us, they are places where our handmade lives, our crafted truth, are shaped.

• Both museum and library, even those with limited collections and services, are engaged in organizing provocative, complex realms of thought and knowledge, realms that exist in parallel to the experiential worlds outside. Both institutions must forge illuminating links to the world beyond their walls, and so are culturally complex in their connections to situations and settings beyond the institutions themselves. The museum and library are in fact dependent upon the world outside; each is a treasury that is renewed by the progress of its culture. They are complex in their potential interactions with their communities, and with each other. And, as their collections grow, it is clear that libraries and museums never become simpler; the complexity of their content never becomes less.

• In the museum or the library, nothing happens without a question, a statement of pursuit or a declared objective, a mix of risk and hope. Even casual use of a cultural institution typically takes on an aim or plan within the limits of time, interest or skill. What happens in the museum or the library always follows from the need to find something, even if that need is invisible or inexplicable. Purposeful use in both institutions is always described in searching language: I am looking for ... , I want to see ... , I am trying to find .... Consequently, the museum and the library need to cultivate and follow the multiple forms of what we might call a searching sensibility.

• Museum and library integrate past and present. A thoughtful user in the museum or library user brings a history of personal reflection and understanding to bear upon the moment of use, and to the design of the search at hand. In the learner's intellectual processes, everything one discovers is compared to past experiences and previous knowledge. Not only does a user encounter the new and the historic, the user also encounters the past that is carried within, as well as an emerging new idea. Literally re-minded by the experiences of the present, the here and now blends its dimensions with the once and the past. No other institutions require us to travel in so many dimensions at once.

• Wherever inquiry takes place, literacy guides the serious, intellectual discoveries of the user of cultural institutions. Language assists the user to find the way toward information, and to understand and process information. The critical intellectual factors of explanation, articulation, and synthesis are experiences of language. Without words, and a level of fluency, we cannot articulate in public or private what has happened in the present of a work, an idea, an object, a text. I find it impossible to imaging a museum without language, and equally impossible to imagine a library without images. Because we have words, we have the ability to see and to capture, and then to hold and to contain, what we witness.

• We can work and think in these institutions for as long as we live, and we can be here with multiple generations at once. Only the library and the museum, among institutions for learning, allow entire families to learn together at one time. This means that the interests of an individual across the lifespan can be explored and renewed over time, and never be exhausted from youth to old age. It also means that youth and elders can gather to tell the stories stimulated by words and things. In museums and libraries, age, knowledge, family, educational or economic status are not barriers to use.

• And when we come here, or go to a library, we are free to do as we care to do. Unlike the school, where the learner must submit to the values and interpretations of an instructor, the situation for experience in the cultural institution is largely under the control of the user. Moreover, the institution succeeds only when it has responded to the needs of the individual user. The responsive institution makes direct, authentic, and unrestricted experiences possible for the user, then it assists the user to illuminate those experiences and see them in further contexts.

• Museum and library succeed through the useful tensions combining intellectual work and intellectual play, the known and the unknown, the conventional and (sometimes right next to it) the revolutionary. When we enter a cultural institution, we find there an environment that challenges and tempts us, even as we find more to know than we can possibly master. The existence of even a single possibility can create a powerful tension between the desirable and the actual, the clear and the shrouded. These are the tensions of learning.

• The structure and process of the museum and the library are the same for every learner: You must begin where you are, assessing the parts of knowledge to be understood and mastered over time. The learning is connective and integrative, evolving slowly and not arriving as if for an examination. Here learners fabricate and build their own minds; they do not wait to receive the mind of a professor or other teacher. Here learners combine pieces for themselves. Nothing about this is easy.

• Ultimately, at heart, both museums and libraries are institutions that give information to their users: through vision, words, comparisons, suggestions, or the powerful presence of a reorganizing concept, an insightful connection. Libraries connect information to the processes of individual cognitive, and personal, and imaginative, and economic energy. Museums connect information to the experiences of awe and surprise that follow from seeing the thing itself that has been brought before us.

And so, when I welcome you to this collaboration, you know why I say that something very important is happening here. I hope that, as you move forward to work with each other, you will do these things.
I hope that you will think out loud as you plan; use language to capture the unknowns that will challenge yourselves most. Speak these unknowns to your users as well. Share the tasks of the museum clearly and openly. Let your community assist you as you plan and build exhibits. Ask each other the questions that will challenge you most.
I hope you will build structures for encounters. Think of them as forums for encounters among peers, as opportunities for encounters with experts, as councils for rethinking policies and practices, as specific efforts to reach out to parents and children whose needs are often the same (for literacy, for attention, for guidance). Remember that storytelling is a structure; but it can also be a situation of surprise, where all the stories come from new experiences. These structures help to complete the museum and the library; the cultural institution is an open work until we close it through our experiences and actions.
I hope that you think of your work as a problem that needs to be solved every day, and that every day provides an opportunity to reinvent how you assist learners toward what they need most: a helping mind, a repertoire of ideas and tools, and connections to what might happen next. Every life bears its own unfinished issues, and every life is unfinished in a different way. I hope that you will develop a heuristic comprising the best questions, the most useful questions you can find, questions that open and direct the energies and processes of thinking.

• What do you see?

• What might you ask of it?

• As you proceed, how does your question change?

• What happens to it?

• What is most interesting here?

• What remains unknown to you?

• What do you want to know next?

Our questions -- like telescopes or microscopes -- are instruments that concentrate our attention and allow us to focus on those parts of the unknown that engage us most. Without such mechanisms, we cannot understand the dimensions hidden from our vision.
I hope you will investigate apprenticeship as a model for thinking about learning. There is a fine literature about learning and thinking that will take you far beyond the conventional wisdom about teaching and learning. I think of course of Vygotsky and Bruner, but also of Barbara Rogoff, Jean Lave, Frank Smith, and John Dewey. Attention must be paid to learning, if we are to live up to learners.
Collaboration is of course full of questions itself, and it leads me to the best question of all, now the question to be left for you to consider, as you begin. Only you can answer it: What happens when caring minds meet? I wish you the very best as you find out for yourselves, as you will, through your own gifts of reciprocity and mutual engagement. I thank you for the opportunity to say these things to you today.