When I wrote my paper examining the role and value of education in the museum environment I touched on a few ideas comparing them to schools. For clarification I was not, nor am I intending on, stating why one is better than the other. Instead I am looking at their current and possible relationship to each other right in this post.
When I was in elementary school and junior high I was never the most interested in going to school. I imagine there are some of us who shared the same idea. I don't want to go to sleep early, wake up early, or do my homework. I wanted to enjoy the fun of running of the bus home to watch cartoons and play games. For myself the only awesome thing related to school was anytime our teachers explained that we were going to have a class field trip to a natural science or space museum. Oh and zoos, cant forget zoo trips.
Apart from the often lengthy bus ride the only low part of those days was the amount of walking and sometimes boring tour guides. I was free from class homework and got to see cool exhibits that I could sometimes interact with, and got to try and convince my parents to get me something at the gift shop.
Looking back at those trips now I wondered why there was not more interaction between the two programs. Even though we are in public history course, I have practically had more museum trips in this semester than I have ever had when I was younger in school. The main difference now was that we went on these trips to get an understanding on how they worked and critiquing them; and possibly finding all the kids a noisy distraction from our point of view now.
I understand that there may have been limitations to the school on what they could manage and afford, but was this a similar experience to others. Was the relationship between the two thinner the older the age groups got? What are your thoughts on their interactions?
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