Night at the Museum

While some may preach that a museum's key function is to educate, (or preserve knowledge, or earn money, or any other singular way to approach the subject) those who look at it from only this perspective miss the point. While this objective is a noble task, as are the other aforementioned goals, a museum's most important task often goes overlooked. A museum should aim to wonder, to draw in a person's attention, to keep him staring at the same work of art for minutes straight as he considers each individual brushstroke. It should not be their sole goal to educate the public, but to garner an appreciation in them.
I think that Night at the Museum got it right, it brought artifacts to life in spectacular fashion. And while it may only be a silly franchise movie, and magical Egyptian tablets cannot really bring a T-Rex skeleton to life, each museum should try to create an atmosphere capable of such great feats, one that gets people thinking that maybe, just maybe, all of this could come to life. When a museum accomplishes this, all the rest will follow. People will learn about the past because of a genuine interest in it, they will explore new worlds and old ones, they will buy those little trinkets and key chains from the gift shop not because of rampant commercialism but as a memory of the past they visited once upon a dream.

A museum should not discourage imagination by claiming their noble mission to educate trumps all, and one should not assume that just because something is fun, we cannot learn from it. Breathe life into learing, preserve artifacts not only physically, but in the minds of those who behold them, and do not reduce souveniers to blatant commercialism, only filling the pockets of beurocrats and going no farther. A museum can be so much than the standard we are holding it to. So let it be.