Despite yesterday’s heavy morning snow, I still managed the visit to Massachusetts Archive which is rightly located next to UMass Boston. This is the first time for me to enter an archives building, not an archive room in a library. I find myself enjoying staying there and researching into the documents in the past.

Instead of simply depicting only on the documents and history of any archive, Farge shared what she saw and experienced in an archive, in my point of view, in a quite romantic way in The Allure of the Archives: “Large painted murals, vaguely bucolic and markedly academic, darken the walls of the adjoining ball-ways…” (19). “If, by chance, he emerges from the same train, you must never greet or even smile at him. Any complicity would inevitably entail troublesome compromises of principle” (21). Unlike Steedman’s statement: “…as English-language readers, we are forced to have the fever, and, if we are historian’s, forced to exasperated expostulation that archives are nothing like this at all” (Steedman, 1163), Farge’s views sound like a sort of commitment to the affection of archives that I’m able to identify with.

With the of the archivist’s guidance, I spent most of the time on reading the administration and files on the development vocational projects high education. The main body of the collection “PLANNING AREAS FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION” is the explanation of the enacted legislation, approved by the Governor in 1969, on the issue of planning vocational technical education. It listed numerous clear objectives and detailed plans of how to establish the vocational education in the aspects of academic study, health and care, employment program, etc.

Another document that attracts me is the pyramid graph of “CAREER EDUCATION” for a specific project named career education program, which articulates the continuous curriculum at every level. Career awareness lies in the bottom of this pyramid, while occupational specialization is of the top this graph. This document reveals itself in the way of the arrangement and values that people’s consideration and judgement on vocational education, which is as well enlightening to some extent nowadays. In this sense, this is the reason why we need to go through the documents in the past.

“The archival document is a tear in thefabric of time, an umplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” (Farge, 6). It is still worthy of considering the value of the combination of the past and present in archive, which not only concerns about the academic research, but the memories of past as well. It also drives me to think about except for the past, how to make this documents more effectively influence the development of education in the future?