Questões

The Role of Museums in Education

Museums provide knowledge and inspiration, while also connecting communities. At a time of economic recovery, and in the run-up to the Olympics, they are more important than ever. Museums and galleries deliver world-class public services which offer individuals and families free and inspiring places to visit and things to do. Museums attract audiences from home and abroad. Museums provide the places and resources to which people turn for information and learning. They care for the legacy of the past while creating a legacy for the future.

Museums are uniquely egalitarian spaces. Whether you are rich, poor, or uniquely-abled, the museum door is always an open welcome. A sense of history and beauty, gifts from our cultural heritage, inspires the ordinary soul into extraordinary possibilities. They bind communities together, giving them heart, hope and resilience. They make a vital contribution to international relations and play a unique role in fostering international cultural exchange. If life was just about earning to eat, we'd be depleted and tired. Museums bring to life the opportunity to experience meaning beyond the mundane. Museums make the soul sing!

The most visible and expected offerings of a museum are its exhibitions. Exhibitions tell stories through objects. In a world where virtual experiences are ever increasing, museums provide tangible encounters with real objects.

What does looking at a crystal clear specimen of beryl, a vertebrate fossil emerging from its plaster jacket, or the flag that flew over Inge Lehman's seismological observatory provide in an educational sense? Some professionals maintain that the visceral reaction of wonder, awe or curiosity – the affective response of the viewer – is the enduring legacy of a museum visit. It opens the door to the visitor's mind, engaging them in a discipline that perhaps failed to interest them through other means, and might inspire them to learn more. Furthermore, the social context of a museum visit, where exploration occurs in a friendly atmosphere without the pressure of tests and grades, helps keep that door open.

Curators and educators also aspire to engage the rational mind of the viewer. A mineral collected in the field and displayed in the museum is out of its original context, but thoughtful juxtaposition of the mineral with other objects helps the visitor make new connections. Exhibit labels or a knowledgeable docent leading a tour not only inform directly, but also guide visitors in making their own observations of the object. Hands-on displays combined with objects can provide forceful connections – an “aha!” experience for the visitor. Alan J. Friedman, the former director of the New York Hall of Science, recounts a watershed experience during a 1970 museum visit in which a model telescope that the could touch and adjust brought to life the meaning of the antique telescope.

Museums are the world's great learning resource – they introduce new subjects, bring them alive and give them meaning. Learning in museums improves confidence and attainment: it also opens us to the views of our fellow citizens. Museum collections and the knowledge of museum professionals inspire learning. As the world around us changes, museums and galleries promote awareness of the critical questions of place, humanity, science and innovation.

Adaptado dos sites: http://tle.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/reprint/26/10/1322.pdf e http://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/media/documents/what_we_do_documents/museums_deliver_full.pdf, pp. 3-4

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And congratulations on your new purchase. You’re now entitled to an unsurpassed service and a number of benefits as part of the Ericsson warranty and service program. Your Ericsson mobile phone was designed to offer you the ultimate in quality, convenience and performance. And of course, we guarantee it. From now on, as the new owner of an Ericsson mobile phone, you’ll have access to a number of exclusive advantages such as: a vast network of Ericsson service centers; a limited 1 year warranty and service agreement, and a toll-free customer service hotline.

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The World Might Be Running Low on Americans

    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.

    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.

    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.

    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.

    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.

    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.

    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.

    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.

    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.

    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.

    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades. 

    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.