29 Museum Education Between the Devil of the Business Model and the Deep Blue Sea of Public Service Kaija Kaitavuori Independent Art Historian and Gallery Educator In this story, there are three characters, three powers that battle over the rule of the (art) museum. Let us call them Politics, Business and Academia. ‘Politics’ here stands for the processes through which politically elected actors and their policy agendas guide and affect the way publicly funded cultural organisations function. ‘Business’ is a placeholder for all the corporate and private interests that have an ever-growing presence in the museum. ‘Academia’ embraces the professional field of art based on research, education, specialised publications and media, which is maintained by art schools and universities and forms the intellectual core of art museums. This article intends to investigate how the museum (or any other cultural institution) is caught in the middle of the triangle of forces, a drama in which these protagonists make claims on the museum and its activities. In particular I will consider how these claims affect the education departments. The account is based on my own practical experiences and examples from Finland and the UK. A configuration of interests The effect of the first figure, ‘politics’, has two dimensions. On the one hand, it is felt through intensified administration and managerialism. Along with the public cultural and education sectors as a whole, museums are nowadays expected to plan and report their activities using the procedures and forms of public administration. It is not simply a question of publicly subsidised institutions reporting their use of taxpayers’ money but of a total system borrowed from the business sector, called New Public Management (NPM). NPM has its characteristic methods and structures, but I think its most insidious influence is on language and thinking. The museum, and culture in general, has been colonised by administrational concepts and managerial vocabularies of benchmarking, performance indicators and impact factors. Culture has become a set of products: in planning ahead, the work to be done is formalised into an ‘output agreement’ and communication between people about past experiences is