Thank you very much for the opportunity to share this brief testimony for the record that I submit on behalf of the American Association of Museums, the national museum organization that has helped America's museums and their staffs serve communities and families since 1906. One of the reasons that I have been a museum educator for over 25 years is because of the magic that happens when young people encounter art in the museum setting. I wanted to pick bamboo to make soup for my parents and I wanted to plant a garden in the back field. The successful museum educator is part scholar, part artist, part psychologist, part actor, and most importantly, a passionate teacher.
Some museums offer sustained instruction, while others only get a brief encounter with students.
In either case our main objective is to seduce students into wanting to learn more. As museum educators we know that our work is by nature incomplete, we are part of a larger educational process and we embrace that role. We work in close partnership with schools. Every year 75,000 school children participate in lessons at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They travel around the world visiting art from China, India and Japan, they try on armor, they imagine themselves as runaways in the museum, and they track down mythological characters.