Soares Ceolin abstract 2008
The new generations and the interest for the numismatic sciences
The Museum of Money of the Central Bank of Brazil – “Museu de Valores”, was created with the primary objective of preserving the nation's heritage on the progress of means of payment, based on the principle that money is an important form of a people's cultural expression, and an essential element in economic history. To this end, the Museum has brought together, organized, and preserved bank notes, coins and other documents and objects that, in some form or another, express monetary value.
The Museum maintains a system of permanent, temporary and travelling exhibits with the purpose of both showing and disseminating information on its collection. It also provides consultation services in the area of numismatics, and has an ongoing program of cooperation with schools. By this program, the Museum receives annually around 15.000 students. The principal objective is the young people and the focus is an educative contribution for our country.
In fact, the museum’s role extends beyond showing of the historical objects and telling about history. Now it should be an agent to promote, using its tools, the redemption of the important social values connected with the appropriate use of the money.
However, day by day dealing to this work, we observe that:
· A healthy developing of new generations about using of money depends the knowledge of the monetary politics functioning and also on practices as investment and the financial resources economy;
· The education action exceeds the limits of the our rooms of exhibition towards the frontiers of our country;
The intellectual production about our collection and their exhibition is the base for all that work, but we also should disseminate the interest about collecting means of payment too, because the information is not enough to conquer the interest on this theme and to be understood by the young people;
There are some cultural habits that we should incentive and disseminate what can contribute to develop the interest on the monetary knowledge and on the numismatic sciences by the new generations
So, we conclude that we have to work hard to produce mechanisms that stimulate this practice, and to guarantee in the future the continuity of this flow of knowledge in our society. We believe that we so can avoid the reduction of interested in collecting coins and increase the number and quality of young numismatic collectors. In our point of view, to attract the attention to the economical and monetary history and to the numismatic sciences, we have to show the importance of the existence of a museum and how is relevant a collection. But we need to show too that if there are museums it’s because one time, somebody decided to start and to develop its own collection and, one time, somebody decided to form a museum or to give his collection to one museum. On the other hand, the developing and the maintaining a collection by kids and teenagers is a big challenge, because now a days there are many mass appeal, like multiplayer online games, and other interests and needs in their lives interfering and changing traditional and popular culture, as forming collections and historical objects interesting. Up to some years behind, in our country, children usually have collected stickers, pennants, caps, postal stamps, coins and other objects. Unfortunately this practice is being suffocated by other modern charms, specially the television and the electronic plays.
Before this situation, the challenge is: “How to produce attractive events that could do children and adolescents fall in love with the beautiful world of the bills and coins? And, a special challenge to Brazil is: How to do it in a larger country with very different social level and cultural characteristics?
We understand that the creation of institutional ways to guarantee the flow of information linking the public and the Museum can be the solution. But, not using only the electronic channel of the Internet. The nets formed by the public schools, the postal company, and the others public and private empires can help us to take our programs even to the most humble towns of our country.
So, we think that the monetary museum should be positioned as a point of support to information on something from school curriculum topics to college planning. It should be a vehicle to reflect about the cultural formation of the new generations, stimulating healthy practices for the personal economy and of the national economy. For example, the information and the knowledge about money, as well as the stamp collecting and the other similar sciences can stimulate healthy habits like: the organization, the attention, the exchange, the observation, the financial application and the wonder for the history.
In this sense, we intend to present at the plenary session of XV ICOMON Meeting 2008 a brief overview about what we are developing in our educative program to save the numismatic sciences and what we can offer to the Brazilian education about these sciences. These are:
· “School Museum Program goes to the rural zone”;
· “National Award to the Young Numismatists”
· “School Museum Program into the Museum”