A recent visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York reveals two types of visitors: (1) grownups and teenagers absorbed in taking selfies in front of ancient dinosaur bones, and (2) kids who find those bones fascinating.
The first group is more interested in the images on their smartphones than in actually examining a life-size reconstruction of Tyrannosaurus rex. Members of the second group are busy interacting.
A ponytailed elementary-school girl sits on the floor, lost in her crayon drawing of the creature whose skeletal outline is mounted in front of her. A group of wide-eyed preschoolers, holding onto loops attached to a long, thick rope clutched by adult guides at each end, are being shepherded in a snaking line through the crowded exhibit. They're listening to every word the guide is saying. Adolescents gawk at displays of taxidermy--elephants, black rhinos, cheetahs, gorillas, giraffes--that make up the museum's astonishingly lifelike and biologically accurate dioramas in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals.
And there's one kid who's earnestly asking his dad all sorts of those annoying kid-style questions about a case holding the remains of a long-extinct saber-toothed cat. The dad, like most of us, doesn't have all the answers. But to his credit, he isn't shooting photos of himself with his cell phone. He's using it to look up facts to share with his son.
You shouldn't get your science from watching Night at the Museum (even though the 2006 film and its sequels attracted plenty of non-museum types to the Upper West Side). But you can get that science, along with everything you might want to know about culture, history, art, and more, at museums and art galleries--not only in New York, but in Arkansas' own Old State House Museum, Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, the Clinton Presidential Center, the Arkansas Arts Center, the Historic Arkansas Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and many others.
So do yourself, and your children, a favor. Take them to the places that will leave lasting images of something other than you grinning into a small screen.
Editorial on 10/07/2015