Education: New Theaters for Learning

Washington's newest attraction opens this week in the south wing of a downtown elementary school. Its name—the Center for Inquiry and Discovery—belies the informal vitality and animation within, where visitors build geodesic domes out of bamboo, lift weights on pulleys or take car engines apart. CID is a museum for children, ages four through 14, the latest entry in an expanding field. "What's important is participation," explains Doris Whitmore, president of the American Association of Youth Museums. "Without a hands-on approach, it's a dead museum."

Prehistoric Skeletons. Lloyd Hezekiah, director of the renowned Brooklyn Children's Museum, which began in 1899 and this past May moved out of temporary quarters in a renovated pool hall and into a free-form $4 million building, calls children's museums "theaters for learning." Showmanship and pedagogy are blended together to create exhibits designed to captivate children on their own level. Instead of being locked away in glass cases, objects ranging from prehistoric skeletons to 19th century dolls are meant to be touched, tapped or even taken apart to discover what lies within. A model of a diamond crystal is so large that children can play inside it. The Boston Children's Museum, headed by Pediatrician Benjamin Spock's son Michael, takes its cue from a Chinese proverb: "I hear and I forget, I see and remember, I do and I understand."

San Francisco attracts children to a place aptly named the Exploratorium. In Seattle kids can ride on a giant gyroscope to experience the principles of mechanical equilibrium, which kept the Gemini space capsule, conveniently on exhibit near by in a mockup, on target. In Jacksonville, a children's museum features a model of the ear, nose and throat canals large enough to crawl through. The Boston Children's Muse um has an area called Grandmother's Attic, where gold lame dresses and high-button shoes can be tried on. In Indianapolis, which last year became the site of the world's largest children's museum with the opening of a five-acre, $6.8 million building, an 1860 locomotive and caboose are displayed along with a Victorian railway station.

Behind the fun lies a purpose. Hezekiah calls it "holistic education," encouraging the child to see how the objects of the world relate to each other. In Brooklyn, for example, a stream of water leads to a paddle wheel, which provides the power for a working gristmill. "Our main goal," says CID Director Ann White Lewin, "is to help children believe in their own creative abilities."