Musing in the museum

I'm sitting here in the café of a museum. It's one of my favourite places to sit, but I've not done it for too long. It's a great place to work, or think, this café, quite apart from seeing the museum itself. The floor is made of wooden "bricks", reflecting the red brickwork of the walls. The high roof is pitched glass, with running Venetian blinds. It's always comfortably warm at any time of year (a palm tree grows in a pot half way along the back wall) but there is also the cool sound of water running forever into a mosaic bowl (the entranceway of a shop, no longer in the town itself) from the mouth of a stone lion. At this moment I am the only person here, but it's always peaceful even when full of small children flying from exhibit to exhibit in full cry.

It's good to see children in here, and especially so to see them enjoying it.

I wasn't keen on museums as a child in the 1950s and early 1960s; I was taken to them regularly, but they seemed dry, dusty, lifeless places. It wasn't that the ancient didn't fascinate me; it did. I knew the meaning of words such as archaeology and paleontology before I started school. By age five I was an avid collector of fragments from past worlds, and my bedroom was a small museum in itself. I was in love with large scale maps of all kinds. My favourite maps were "six inch" (1:10500 scale) and, even better if I could get them, "thirty six inch" (1:1750), on which could be seen the intricate geography of field systems, encampments, paths. I could disappear into a large scale map like the children in a magical story (Hilda Lewis’s The Ship That Flew, for example; or CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) who find a door to other worlds. Once in the map, so long as no mundane adult call disrupted the magic, I could wander for hours a richly imagined landscape which I would joyfully recognise in my mid teens when I discovered JJ Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages.

So why, with all of this, did I not like museums? I recognise, of course, that it may have been something in me. Perhaps I lacked discipline; perhaps I liked my history on my own terms and didn’t care for the real or official version. Or perhaps I just preferred to be out and about in field and stream, not indoors. But I don't think it was any of those things; I think that museums were different, then. I don't think that they were intended to appeal to young minds ... or maybe I mean to small anatomies. I remember some museums which did appeal to me – London's Science and Natural History Museums, for instance. And looking back now, those which appealed to me were those in which everything (or at least a good quantity) was visible even if you were only a metre tall or so. Too many museums (especially local ones, where my map fuelled adventures could have found concrete form in the Roman coins and paleolithic arrow heads) had everything in horizontal glass topped trays conveniently placed for adult inspection but not for mine.

How different they are today. The children who come here (there are seven of them here in the café area now, all looking eagerly at exhibits of their own volition without any need for parental prodding) can see almost everything - and a significant proportion of it is on their own level, however young they may be.

It's not just about level though. Everything here is displayed differently from those long ago museums of my childhood as well. Opposite me as I type is a shop window used as a case for changing displays which are the product of personal passions. At the moment, the theme is Punch and Judy.

Nor is everything old. I can see Punch and Judy artefacts from before I was born, but also a poster and a toy which are probably on sale today. And that is part of another, larger difference: everything here is contextualised. Punch and Judy are placed in a context which links history to the present. The artefacts upstairs, from paleolithic to iron age, are set in context too. Broad brush painted backgrounds for the stone age show bears, caves, savannah, mastodons. Context is developed in other ways. During school holidays I have been here with Liam, aged 7, for a Viking day: he sat in a furs within a Viking ship board tent, learnt to play the board game hnefatafl against other children and members of a Viking re-enactment society, learnt to count in Norse... at one end of the museum (once a fire station) is a cottage which has been arranged to show the life and history of one of its last real inhabitants.

What a difference from those glass topped trays of fragments from my childhood, baize lined and devoid of any context at all. No wonder I preferred my own private museum, where each object carried its own context – the place where I found it, the lie of the land around it, the large scale map describing both, the geological map provided an X-ray vision view of the skeleton beneath.

The children in my extended family, from nearly ten to only just five, actually ask to be taken to museums. Last week it was a larger city museum; and during that visit they asked for a return trip (both have been several times before) to this one.

I said that it is too long since I sat here like this – and so it is. I buy an annual ticket, every year, but recently have neglected to use it as fully as I could. Just around the corner is the town’s excellent library, entry point to a huge local, countrywide and international network of resource. I have become too accustomed to accessing that network through university libraries, or just dropping in and consulting a book in situ - which leaves the local library and its funding with no trace of my presence. I have taken to buying books instead of borrowing them. I have gone so long without actually borrowing something that the system has forgotten me – I have had to rejoin. I have allowed myself to forget that the local library has its own character and subtle differences which make it more than just a socket for plugging into that network. The seductive power, reach and convenience of the world wide web make it all to easy to just sit lazily in one place and forget the advantages of others.

From now on, I have decided, I will not just visit the library - I will borrow at least on item a week. Today I started with a CD of music in a genre I do not know. And I will resume weekly visits to the museum, too, so I can be regularly reminded of how good it is, how wonderfully things have changed, how precious a resource it is and what a tragedy it would be if it withered from lack of use.

All of this is connected to Thursday’s Tears For Fears post, and yesterday's Something about Jennifer too. I work part of my time inside the education system, and have long felt (and the young woman crying her heart out in the alcove on Thursday reinforced the feeling) that we have too much system and too little education. We have forgotten what education means (the word comes from Latin for "to lead out"). Assessment is an essential part of the quality control process, necessary to ensure than the educational product is as good as it can be ... but assessment has come to mean testing, and test results instead of education have gradually come to be the product itself. This is so in Europe; it is even more so in the US; less far advanced in some other countries, but still true. I often say that I believe I do valuable work within the education system – but only in the cracks between what I am paid for; it’s true, and not only for me but for all the dedicated people who work alongside or around me, at all levels from chalk face to senior management, everywhere from Anchorage to Zanzibar. It’s the system which has lost its handle on education, not the people within it.

Sitting here in the museum is like taking off my shoes and feeling the earth between my toes: a reality check, reminding me what education really is and should be.