Living in a learning society: Museums and free-choice learning

Globally, Western societies are in the midst of changes as great as any in their history, changes that are affecting everyone. These changes, which directly influence museums of all types, are tied to the shifting of Western economies from ones that are industrially based to those that are information and knowledge-based ( Dizard 1982 ). The transition from a goods-based to a knowledge-based economy was noted first in America by Princeton economist Fritz Machlup (1962 ), and substantiated over a decade later by the US Department of Commerce (1977 ). Knowledge and information (which Machlup felt were functionally the same) are rapidly becoming the major economic product of society. These changes are dramatically changing the way in which citizens in the developed world conduct their lives. The engine that is driving this new transformation may be economics, but the fuel that it runs on is learning. Around the same time as futurists were beginning to herald the coming of the knowledge economy, a number of forward-thinking educators were talking about the transition of America and other developed countries into learning societies (for example, Sakata 1975 ; Christoffel 1978 ). In A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald.

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