At home and not at home in the national museum: on nostalgia and education

Abstract

This paper discusses the educational significance of the national museum as a reminder of the nature of home and its relation to nostalgia. I contextualise the sense of home in various ways. First, the national museum materialises the nostalgic claim of ‘our’ history, the collective memory and identity, which is in some way or other mixed up with the personal memory. Second, it problematises the relation to home. Barbara Cassin’s question, ‘when are we ever at home?’, subtitle to her book Nostalgia (2016), expresses a puzzle that may be apparent both to those who have never left home and to those who have to leave their home for personal, social, or political reasons. In the light of Cassin’s book, the national museum comes to be seen in a contradictory way: it provides the ground and materialisation for the collective identity of a people, and it leaves open to something more disturbing. Yet this disturbance, if welcomed and embraced, is crucial to realising the educative importance of the museum in its contribution to the understanding of the human condition.