A 4 · What historic sites can offer to learners
Why should we study historic buildings? Why is an understanding of the historic environment important?
Four strands can be traced in learning within the built environment:
• the study of the grand historic site, whether above or below ground
• the study and understanding of everyday surroundings
• the processes of design, construction and presentation
• an understanding of the ways of life of people living in the past.
The learning experience enjoyed within a historic setting ranges from that of the visitor who may enjoy a life-transforming experience, to the individual who as a result of such a visit becomes aware, on a daily level, of the character of the house or flat, and neighbourhood, they live in.
The built environment can be endlessly stimulating. Being aware of one’s surroundings, whether built or natural, and understanding why they look the way they do, enhances our everyday experience. Almost all of us live in buildings and visit buildings constantly. At best, they can give us an enormous amount of pleasure. But not only that: they can give a sense of identity and rootedness.
Buildings and gardens, as well as ruins and landscape, can inspire awe, wonder and pleasure. They can relieve us from the limitations and monotony of everyday life, and provide an alternative, positive, experience. They may offer an opportunity for contemplation, the chance to enjoy a sense of calm or of heightened awareness, a sense of the sacred. They may act as a refuge from the everyday world: people go to the gardens of a historic house because it is a beautiful and safe place for children to play, or to a ruined abbey because it can foster meditation on issues beyond our everyday life.
For schoolchildren, a visit to a historic building, creating a greater understanding of the history that is all around us, can offer a new and fresh experience which may have a powerful effect on the child’s development. Visiting places of all sorts, old or new, offers a stimulating alternative to the classroom. A sense of fun and happiness in learning can be encouraged by exploring an unfamiliar place. Historic sites have the capacity to enrich the school curricula in all the countries of the United Kingdom.
For adults, the same is true. The visual stimuli provided by an historic site, its rarity, the fact it has survived for so long and may have associations of great interest, can have an extraordinary effect on people. Studying old places offers us the opportunity to expand the perceptions and creativity of people of all ages, and gives us the chance to understand – or at least glimpse – attitudes and ways of life outside our common experience. Such a revelation is not restricted to those who already possess special expertise.
The experience of spending time within a historic site is itself a means of learning, for adults and children. Educational experiences need not be offered by the site – just being there in pleasurable circumstances can have a positive effect on people. And at a more intense level, we can learn through the revelations that historic places can give us.
Historic sites provide the most easily tangible and visible link with the past, and the further back we go in history the more shared past we have. Through such places we can begin to understand our history, and not only our
history but our present. The early origins of our society, religion, forms of national and local government, the way we live and work and teach and learn and travel, all achieve clearer expression through understanding the buildings used in the past. And because they tell us only a little about the past, they stimulate creative imagination.
Architecture is part of the nation’s cultural identity. It can also be part of the community’s identity. The ability to read the buildings in one’s locality can provide a powerful sense of belonging which crosses divisions of gender, ethnicity and wealth.
For schools, the historic environment can offer insights into a whole range of subjects. The built environment offers remarkable opportunities for cross-curricular work within formal education, opportunities which have been seized by several of the sites discussed in this survey, covering architecture, craftsmanship, textiles, social history, natural history, political history, mathematics, art, dance and photography.
Historic buildings can encourage us to study the high quality of design in the past as well as to consider the process of accretion and development which has led to the present state of historic buildings.
Buildings, or natural scenery, or ancient sites, can give communities a sense of regional or local identity – they are about the present as well as the past. This is true at many levels, from large cities to small communities – particularly ones which have suffered severe economic change in recent years.
Understanding one’s neighbourhood is about realising what gives any place a particular character, and makes people feel they belong to a place, and have a share in its life and its future.
The ultimate goal of heritage education is to ensure that as many people as possible have the chance to encounter the ‘heritage mindset’ and realise that the heritage enhances people’s lives and the well-being of our society.
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'Physical access is not enough. Intellectual accessibility is of prime importance. The
presentation of a site throws up many difficulties. What do people get out of visits? How do you
bring a place to life? It must be emphasised that most sites were built on a set of presumptions
that are alien to our thinking today. How do we explain the opinions of previous centuries that
today would be seen as politically incorrect? The vast majority of the public would not
understand and not agree with past ways of thinking.'
Professor David Cannadine
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