One word

Reading through the conditions for a recent grant application, we came across the following:
To receive a grant your project must help people to learn about their own and other people’s heritage. Your project must also do either or both of the following:

• conserve the UK’s diverse heritage for present and future generations to experience and enjoy.
• help more people, and a wider range of people, to take an active part in and make decisions about heritage.

Regular readers of this blog will have spotted the tiny little word already: the 'and' in the last line. It is not 'or', it is 'and' as in 'and make decisions about heritage'. So this funding body too has fallen for the cult of engagement. It is no longer sufficient to inform, enthral or inspire our audiences, we must now allow them to 'take decisions'.

What form are these decisions to take? Is this 'wider range of people' to be allowed to take decisions about what is and what is not collected or displayed, perhaps in preference to the 'narrower' range of people who just perhaps might know more the answers to those questions? We are old-fashioned enough to trust heritage managers to know about their subject and to make recommendations or to interpret those collections to us. This is now heresy.

Whatever happened to that old adage that we will preserve what we love; love what we understand; understand what we know about and know about things we have explored. Now, it seems, we must ask a wider range of people - perhaps uninformed - to take decisions on what we preserve, without exploration, knowledge or understanding.

And how do we 'evidence' - a horrible verbal use of the word - the 'making decisions'? That is another question.