How To's: Education

Education is the one part of historical preservation which is often neglected.

Education travels a two way street. We preserve an artifact or a site so that people can learn from the artifact or site. At the same time, a preservationist also has to work to educate the public on what can be learned form an item in order for it to be preserved. Some education is required in order to preserve.

A perfect example is the burial sites of Centre County. Burial site restoration is often a volunteer intensive task. It requires labor in a field of expertise which has only a few and very costly experts. Therefore it is up to the community to be their own experts and to supply their own labor. The amount of volunteers is directly related to the community's awareness of the need, therefore some education is needed before any preservation can fully begin.

But there is also the education that results in the preservation. This education is much more subtle, but affects the community at large. In fact, in many ways, it has to be subtle in order for it to work. Education, particularly in regards to preservation, is often passive. A historic building is restored and, for the most part, most of the people simply drive by it everyday. But the building is still passively educating these people who are driving by. They recognize that the building is historic, an old date stone might boldly declare its age, they also begin to recognize what a historic building in their area would have looked like. Certainly they might not be able to describe the building in architectural terms, and they may not even be able to tell if it is Federal or Victorian. But the building becomes part of our collective identity with the past and present. A historic site becomes representative of the past and through its mere existence is educating all of us about certain cultural elements of the past.

There is also the education which is not passive but very active. Cemetery tours, slide shows, veterans day events, are all more active ways of showing the community the importance of Centre County's burial sites.

My personal belief about the education concerning burial sites is that they should be far more inviting to the public. This might be a hard thing to justify, given some of the acts of cemetery vandalism across the state and country, but I firmly believe in it. I think cemeteries make great picnic spots, a great place for a stroll, and there is far more sculpture sitting in the sites of Centre County than there is in any of its museums.

As part of this more inviting approach and also as a way of recognizing volunteer caretakers, CCHS and CCGS have proposed putting up signs in front of the various cemeteries which have been adopted by volunteer caretakers.

I also feel that sites should be far more interactive. I'll admit that I am not a historian, and have a tendency to discuss communities rather than specific people. But I will also admit to being very entertained by the stories which hang about old cemeteries. Each stone has some story to tell, some piece of history which most of the county's citizens have never heard.

I found the list of interred which is kept under the sign at Swamp Poodle to be a fascinating example of this interaction. That someone has created this list and posted it means that the cemetery is still telling us its stories, even though it is hidden among the trees. I think another important aspect of this project is to include with each site, each marker even, the various stories which it tells.