The central role of public education and outreach.
We hope to see the experience of heritage and the results of CRM take a more central place in every experience. More and better public education and outreach will be needed to accomplish this goal. We know that the audiences for museums are limited in the most general sense, and in most case, to the relatively well educated. Why not seek and find the means of delivering alternative experiences for cultural resources for those less culturally predisposed to museum visiting? The chapters related to education and outreach explore some of these issues, e.g. in direct education of school age children as a means to educate, but also enthuse, future users of heritage. They also outline the considerable difficulties involved in attempting evaluation of such progeamnes. Hence, our plea that outcomes and uses of cultural resources, e.g. interpretation, education, exhibition, be planned as part of the overall strategy for its conversation, not simply bolted on as an afterthought, or as a weak justification for de facto decisions taken, driven by our professional concerns, and from within our professional, relatively closed, circles.
Moe, for instance, describes the initiation of a long-term strategy in the USA to preserve a fragile archaeological record though school-age education. The two programmes she reviews experienced marked differences in the success of their attempts to change attitudes as between rural and urban areas, consistent with virtually all other large-scale social programmes. Do we need different heritage interpretive strategies that reflect this?