Hayden Planetarium in the 1950s, when astronomy was just astronomy

[Reposted from July, 2016]

ALAN writes:

To the modern mind, it is never enough that a thing be what it is. The modern do-gooder is going to make it over into “fun” for everybody. A pleasant restaurant is never enough; it must be made into “fun” for children. An art museum, historical exhibit, or planetarium are never enough; they must be made into “fun” for the bored. A library containing the wisdom of the ages is never enough; it must be made into a fun house for everyone. Children’s remarkable capacity for learning is never enough; learning must be made into “fun.”

To shop for groceries in a supermarket is never enough; it must be made into a “fun” experience with clerks and cashiers frozen in perpetual smiles and fun “music” blasting from speakers that are beyond any known earthly power to turn off.

I was standing on the platform at a Metro Link train station on the St. Louis riverfront when I noticed a sign advertising the St. Louis Science Center and Planetarium. “We specialize in making science fun!” the sign proclaimed. That was a year ago. Today the sign has been modified to read “We put the element of FUN into science!”

The mindset that we see here has nothing to do with science, or with learning, or with life.  It has to do with a certain incapacity to appreciate the world. It has to do with bombast, sales, and marketing.  Such people have not the slightest interest in encouraging anyone to learn about science.  Such people are shills and hucksters who would box and market the sky, the moon, and the stars if they could.  They would reduce those things to a circus of gimmicks, thrills, sensations, and contrived “hands-on” push-button FUN! for children.

Did Archimedes, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, Marie Curie and countless others pursue an interest in science in order to have “fun?”

Science is like anything else worth doing:  Much hard work, and alternately challenging, frustrating, and gratifying.  Children with a curiosity about science will come to discover that and understand it in due course if they are not sold a bill of goods by people who promise to make it into “Fun” for them.

Life is filled with things to see, hear, explore, learn about, and learn to appreciate, and all children are intensely curious to know more about any such things that spark their interest.  It isn’t their fault that their capacity and wish to learn are understood so poorly or not at all by most of their elders.

Eighty years ago at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago:

        “…The visitors come to see a stirring spectacle, the heavens brought within the confines of museum walls.  Not a trivial plaything…but the heavens portrayed in great dignity and splendor, dynamic, inspiring, in a way that dispels the mystery but retains the majesty, a revelation of the sky so beautiful…..”

   [Philip Fox, Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum of Chicago, Lakeside Press, 1935, p. 26]

Nowhere in the booklet were people encouraged to come to the Planetarium to have fun.

Fifty years ago at the McDonnell Planetarium in St. Louis:

The phrase “Per Aspera Ad Astra” is used as the planetarium’s motto.  [“Hard work to the stars”]  Nowhere in Planetarium brochures from the 1960s were people encouraged to come to the Planetarium to have fun.

At age 14, I discovered the splendor of the night sky and the world of astronomy.  Half a century ago, I visited the venerable Hayden Planetarium in New York, the Air Force Academy Planetarium in Colorado Springs, and London Planetarium.  I attended lectures and classes at the St. Louis Planetarium, which led to an interest in the use and limitations of scientific thought.  At that planetarium in 1965, my father and I walked among exhibits of satellites, rockets, and the very Mercury and Gemini spacecraft in which astronauts Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom had orbited the earth.  No one ever said to us, “Visit the Planetarium and have fun!”  That idea never occurred to us.

I became friends with the planetarium’s assistant director, who was also an amateur astronomer.  Neither he nor anyone else ever said or imagined that they were there to provide fun for visitors.  Lectures and exhibits were presented with a kind of dignity and gravitas that was once common among American grown-ups but that is long since vanished from this nation.

From dignity and “Hard work to the stars” to “We specialize in making science fun!” is the distance between two worlds:  The philosophical distance between a culture run by grown-ups and a culture of perpetual adolescents.  Grown-ups could and did understand form and measure, but adolescents can understand nothing beyond immediacy and sensation.  The calm dignity and restraint in the planetarium of old are now long gone among people who are busy amusing themselves to death.  (Thank you, Neil Postman.)

In the 1960s I read Sky & Telescope magazine regularly.  It was published by and for people who had an interest in astronomy.  It did not aim for a mass audience.  It was printed on high-quality paper with justified columns and sober articles.  Today, it resembles a comic book, with lots of color pictures and exclamation points in a format purposely designed to be hip and fun.  Its cover format was also purposely changed from what it had been for decades, a symbolic severing of the old and the past from the young and the new.  It also now includes little pictures of authors smiling at the reader, an idea its editors in the 1960s would have dismissed as ridiculous.

The dumbing down of magazines like Sky & Telescope parallels the increasing number of so-called “graphic novels” being published nowadays, pretentious comic books printed on slick paper for the semi-literate graduates of American schools for whom reading a book without pictures on every page is an insurmountable challenge; and the proliferation of slogans like “Fun facts!” and “Awesome facts!” that we see so often in today’s books, magazines, and newspapers; and the renaming of college courses to attract infantile-witted students.  (“College course names changed to kiddy names to attract students”, View from the Right, Sept. 10, 2009)  

My eyesight is terrible and I will never again see the night sky in all its magnificent beauty as clearly as I saw it in the years 1963-1975.  That is my loss.  History, science, poetry, music, imagination, contemplation, wonder, appreciation…..all can be found in the night sky—if a person’s frame of mind has not been corrupted by the depravity of excess that surrounds us.

Eric Sloane understood this when he wrote:

“I believe that the sky was created for pure beholding; that one of man’s greatest joys can be simply looking at the sky.”

             [Look at the Sky!, Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1951, p. xv ]     

So did physicist Matthew Luckiesh, writing in 1922:

“The sky is the countenance of Nature upon which its endless variety of moods and emotions is displayed….  It is strange how unacquainted most persons are with the heavens….  Modern educational systems do little or nothing toward developing or even maintaining the divine gift of imagination to each child who begins a sojourn in this world….  The sky is surely meant for all, but how many see its marvels, learn its lessons, or give it thought?….”

[Matthew Luckiesh, The Book of the Sky: A Résumé of Personal Experience and Observation, Dutton, 1922, pp. 12-15 ]

I saw one of those marvels just a few weeks ago in a beautiful display of cumulo-nimbus clouds in the hour before sunset, tall and richly-textured clouds in shades of white and gray and pink and orange.  Such marvels often appear at unexpected moments.  As I write these words at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, sunlight filters into the room on one side while raindrops fall and a rainbow appears against a bank of gray clouds in the west.  Five minutes later, all of that changed.

The naturalist Henry Beston wrote in 1928:

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.  …..Are modern folk afraid of night?  Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?  …..today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night…..”

[Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928), Penguin paperback edition, 1988, pp. 168-69]

Regarding the splendor and beauty of the night sky, the nature writer Raymond Tiftt Fuller wrote:

 “I have always thought it odd that so little is written or said about this wondrous thing.”  To the claim that modern cities are aglow with thousands of advertising lights, he responded that the stars in the night sky provide thousands of lights—and none of them advertising anything.  “If you were to ask me for an opinion as to what chiefly is ‘the matter with’ the younger generation, I would reply: ‘The same that is the matter with most of their parents; trying to build a life around sheer entertainment—being entertained, I mean, by somebody else’…..”

 [Raymond T. Fuller, Now That We Have To Walk: Exploring the Out-of-Doors, Dutton, 1943, pp. 49, 81 ]

His words apply with even greater force to today’s adolescent-witted parents-who-need parents who think that the latest, cutting-edge, high-tech toys and gadgets will make learning easy and “fun” for children.

Speaking in 1939 at the dedication of the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, Dr. Charles Lewis said that the night sky was “the world’s first motion picture theater:”

“The ancients had no broad, smooth highways upon which to speed in automobiles.  They had no cinema.  They had no brightly lighted concert halls.  The heavens, at night, were their theater.  We know that they watched he skies intently…..and peopled them with amazing creatures…..

Sophisticated moderns that we are, we look at the stars and cannot for the life of us see the Great Bear.  We call it the Big Dipper.  We utterly fail to visualize the figures in the sky as the ancients did.  This, we must believe, is because their imaginations were better than ours….less dulled by artificial stimuli.  Yet I have never known a city-bred person who, transported to the open country on a vacation, failed to look upon the heavens in wonder and in rapture and to be filled with a longing to know about them…..”

 [Remarks quoted in Joseph Miles Chamberlain, The Development of the Planetarium in the United States, Smithsonian Institution, 1958, p. 271 ]

How many children have never known that experience because they have grown up with their sense of sight sated by thousands of garish color pictures in books and on television? Could they ever “see” the night sky and appreciate it the way people could and did in the years before it became common practice for Americans to inflict such excess upon the child-brain?

How many children will ever see the stars, the Milky Way Galaxy, Orion, the Pleiades, Antares, Vega, Capella, the Northern Cross, the Summer Triangle, the planets, the unexpected meteors and fireballs, the Northern Lights, the vast beauty and quiet of the sky at night?  Without, that is, the contrived “fun” that their modernist elders are fool and arrogant enough to imagine will “improve” those things?

What can be said about parents who fail to teach their children about “this wondrous thing” that costs nothing and is overhead every clear night?

An astronomy instructor at a college near St. Louis said:  “I had a woman in class the other night from the city who asked me to show her a star.  She and her three children had never seen one.”  [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 27, 2006]

“The beauty of a star-filled sky is a legacy we should not take from ourselves and our children,” wrote St. Louis amateur astronomer Laura Kyro in 1993.

Too late, Laura.  With a few exceptions, most Americans have now abandoned the indescribable beauty of the night sky for the indescribable drivel of television screens.

There is one more point I’d like to make regarding Americans and the night sky. Long, long ago, when this was a free country, amateur astronomers would hold sky-watches and star parties, often in dark rural locations to get away from the bright lights of big cities.  They bothered no one and no one bothered them.  In the mid-1970s, amateur astronomer friends and I took part in some such events near Pacific, Missouri, and Carlyle Lake, Illinois.

And today, a man in New York writes that he “began studying astronomy in the 1960s…  In those Apollo-era times I had no problem recruiting observers.  We could go anywhere in the U.S., at any hour of the night, and were always welcomed by local citizens wanting to support our efforts in space.  Today it’s very different.  …the general population does not have any idea as to why we’d be out looking up at the sky.  These days my telescope and I are more likely to be reported to law enforcement as an obvious terrorist setting up a rocket launcher…..” [Richard P. Wilds, Letter to the Editor, Sky & Telescope, July 2016, p. 6 ]

 Not only are Americans today content to white-out the beauty of the night sky with millions of lights; they are also being taught to surrender the rights and freedom of movement that previous generations of Americans enjoyed and took for granted.  This is another consequence of Nanny Government Do-Gooders who claim to be fighting “terrorism” but are in fact teaching Americans to accept the increasing militarization and regimentation of what some of us can remember as a free country.

— Comments —

A reader writes:

Cherry Lowe, an educator in the classical tradition, wrote: “And the more we say learning should be fun, the more our students are bored.”

Please follow and like us: