Dear Conchlanders,
 
I'm of the opinion that museums cater too much to children, but that this
is a temporary aberration in museum history that will blow over when the
boomers' children are grown. Unfortunately, the curators and collections
may not survive the experience. Let me tell you about one recent experience
at a major American city museum of natural history.
 
My companion and I walked in the door of a refurbished railway station, an
enormous space that now holds three museums. It was magnificent, a splendid
use of a building that might have been torn down otherwise. We walked in
and found a noisy children's interactive center to one side and relatively
quiet galleries to the other. Not being children, we chose the galleries.
The old museum exhibits had been completely replaced: no dust here. Still,
I missed the old cabinets with their arrays of multiple specimens and
labels, which had always impressed me with the sheer richness and diversity
of life. Instead of a hundred good fossils, here there were a handful of
exquisite ones, each carefully labeled to tell a story or a point of
natural history. The care taken to make each label correct and exciting was
really impressive, yet something was lost.
 
It turned out that all of the exhibits are now interactive. Some have
microscopes or other tools to manipulate. Others can be turned on and off.
Most ask the viewer leading questions. One whole gallery had a breathtaking
sequence of exhibits, with a taped guide to tell you about each one. We
were the only ones to take advantage of it, though, and we were handicapped
by children racing past us at high speed, occasionally halting to glance
momentarily at something that caught their eye. What was wrong with these
kids? I wondered. And where were their teachers or parents?
 
After a while, the exhibit labels began to grate on our nerves. They were
too interactive, constantly demanding our attention and directing us to
answer particular questions. My own thoughts were swamped under a deluge of
audio, interactive labels, and noisy children. I was not to be allowed to
create my own thoughts it seemed, though the exhibits were excellent, some
of the best I'd seen, so to some degree it didn't matter.
 
The visit continued like this in one gallery after another. There was
nowhere to sit and contemplate, and it was hard to ignore the distractions.
The low point was reached as I peered into a plexiglas case at a dinosaur
specimen. A child ran up and started banging his hand loudly on the case,
and something in me snapped. I turned to the boy and told him firmly to
stop. That got his attention (well, to be honest, it would get my attention
too if a tall, bearded man said the same to me). He stopped banging, but my
concentration was lost for good. Do they feed these kids anything but
sugar?
 
I hope that common sense will prevail in the long term. I think it's
wonderful to have children's interactive exhibits in one part of the
museum. A soundproofed part; the rest should be for adults. I deplore the
fact that so many museums have been taken over by children's exhibits
altogether. A worse travesty happens behind closed doors: Curators tend to
be laid off, and research collections given away, after new exhibits are
completed. Worst of all, the public is getting the idea that art galleries
are serious matter for adults, but natural history is just for kids.
 
Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA