The Schoolification of Museums and Public Spaces

Have you ever noticed what happens when a child enters a museum?

Very often they are offered a sheet of paper, a kind of puzzle or challenge indicating some things they can “search for” during their visit (the last time my daughter and I visited a museum the paper said “find the 10 hidden mice in the various areas of the exhibit”). Often children are offered a prize if they come back at the end of the visit with their sheet filled out. 

It seems like a fun idea, an interactive idea: making a museum child friendly, especially for children who might be unfamiliar with the space, or for parents who feel worried about not being able to inspire their children. And for many children who are being brought involuntarily to a museum by schools, without a clear sense of why and without any context that can help them feel located, I am sure this approach can help easy entry and provide a focus.

But is this really a child friendly approach, or it is a way of capitulating to school-based ideas about how children function and thus a very child adverse approach? 

You can take the kid out of school, but you can’t take the school out of the community center!

This give-them-something-to-focus-their-distracted-minds-on-and-a-prize-at-the-end approach is the museum equivalent of school. It is based on a lack of trust in children’s ability to explore, observe and learn without extrinsic motivations – incentives, prizes and directives. And it relies on an outcomes-based approach – that children should learn a particular thing during a museum visit, or the visit might be a failure and they will have “lost out” on the intended lesson. It is also based on the assumption that without these incentives – something very specific to anchor on to, something designed by someone else who knows best how to keep their (presumably unruly) focus – children would be bored, distracted and disruptive at museums. Finally, it supposes that if there is no prize at the end, they will not be capable of concentrating, enjoying or getting anything valuable out of their visit. 

I find that the opposite is true. Give a child a list of things to find in a museum and you guarantee the child will look only for those things; they will put on blinders, missing everything along the way that is unrelated to the ‘search’, and they will not have the chance to determine for themselves if anything in fact interests them in the museum. They will not use their own eyes or other senses to see and explore, they will use the eyes and senses of those who have curated their visit. They will not pause on something that caught their fancy, and thus will not learn that the museum is a space where they can discover a new interest. Instead they will race, goal oriented, to filling out their chart and finding the hidden gems in different places, sprint toward yet another “prize” or competition. 

This lack of trust in a child’s ability to learn, focus and discover without other people curating and controlling their journey is a reproduction of the most deeply ensconced and influential element that guide schools and a societal approach to learning that is influenced by school models. It infiltrates our public spaces like museums and libraries, our homes, our consciousness, and even entertainment-oriented spaces, which curate fun and games at the expense of allowing children free unsupervised exploration or play – the kind of play their bodies and minds depended on for centuries in order to grow, socialize and become part of a community.

How Might Children Explore a Museum More Freely?

A truly child-friendly way to allow a young person to be in a museum might be simply to let them explore: they might not see everything you think they should see or fill their notebooks with fun facts. They might not even remember what they saw. But they might investigate, ask questions, run with joy toward pieces of art or artifact that excites them, laugh over an inappropriate image with their friends. Most likely they will learn to love the museum as spaces of investigation and wonder. And if they love the space itself, they will return again and again, and encounter more and more of what the museum has to offer. 

If on the other hand they learn only what the paper told them to learn, and they return for the reward, they will be at school even when they are outside school: guided by extrinsic motivations and tests rather than their own passions, having their natural love of learning or interest-based explorations derailed by a focus on specific outcomes and achievements.

Children are overloaded with our educational assumptions and worries: we curate their learning experiences, we design and control their educational goals, we lead them to focus on results rather than process and we alarm them with the fear that they will be “left behind” or miss out on a set of ideas and topics others decided are vital to their learning. There is always something they must learn in order to remain on course.

If we can’t change schools, let’s at least allow young people to be free of some of these conventions and expectations when they are outside school and in cultural spaces like museums and libraries. Let’s trust that they have eyes, ears, interests and passions. Let’s not behave as if life is a Disney film, where the screen has to be filled with continual a stream of loud noise, fast-moving images and high drama, as if this is the only way to keep children’s eyes and focus; let’s be more like a Hayao Miyazaki film that trusts children can hear in stillness, watch with relaxed awareness, discover gems without roadmaps, and learn from ambiguity.