This office:

• Conceived the Animations to welcome school visits;
• lends educational establishments interactive materials free of charge, so that a memorable lesson can be given in the classroom: Didactic Cases.

As part of its educational mission, the Gold Museum aims to help in the upbringing of young Colombians, by getting them to ask questions about the world around them and to develop an interest in getting to know it and to understand it better, based on reason and science. In particular, to enable them to link the present to the past, and the way they act now to the future. Also, to help them enjoy the world of culture and humanism (and especially museums), to be happy and expressive, and to be capable of living in harmony and working in groups with their peers.

Teachers are invited to attend free meetings that are arranged periodically, so that they can get to know the Museum, its methodology and its educational objectives at first hand. At these meetings, they will tour the new Museum by means of a Pedagogic Animation, and will interact with a Didactic Case.

These meetings are essential if you are thinking of bringing a school group to the Museum. See this month's programme in the Cultural Calendar database (in Spanish), and register by phoning 3432222.

At the end of the meeting, you can register your groups (up to 180 children) in our Animations diary.

If you wish to contact us, write to us at educacionMO@banrep.gov.co.

Schoolchildren and all Colombians have in their hands one way of cooperating with the Bank: by taking care of banknotes, not scratching them or staining them, and not writing on them or creasing them. This avoids them having to be replaced before they are due for this, which is expensive for everyone. And by getting to know banknotes and coins and the safety features associated with these, we will avoid being the victims of forgers and will bring this offence to an end.

This is not an idle question, because if you ask your pupils or the people around you, you will find that a sad opinion about museums still prevails: "it's where old things are kept", "it's a place we have to go to do our homework", "it's somewhere boring and covered in dust":

Museums, however, are changing, and are contradicting those theories. And teachers are an essential part of that change towards the new museum concept.

UNESCO has defined a museum as "a permanent, non-profit organisation that serves society and its development and is open to the public, and which acquires, preserves, researches, communicates and displays material testimonies of human beings and their environment, for study, education and enjoyment purposes".

Museums are special, magical places, where objects become cultural memory; they help us think not only about our past but also about who we are today and how we want to build our future, as persons and as members of society.

The Gold Museum, in particular, preserves a magnificent collection of objects made not only of gold but also of copper, pottery, shell, bone and wood, along with textiles and, in general terms, remains which lead the visitor towards the true objective of the different exhibitions - discovering how the societies which inhabited what is now known as Colombia lived in pre-Hispanic times. If we discover all those diverse and creative societies which knew so much about the environment in which they lived, if we can recognise ourselves in so many of their traditions that we still retain, and if we think what a society is like and above all how these can change with time, we will be using that heritage to build our own identity, every day.

If museums are to be places for reflecting on heritage and identity, the public have to visit them frequently and feel they are theirs, that the museums belong to them. And this is only possible if people enjoy their visits. The Gold Museum is impressive, spectacular, full of wonders, but if a schoolchild has a long or impossible task to do while he (or she) is at the Museum, he will not want to go back to the "Ogre's Museum" ever.

Teachers frequently give children a questionnaire to answer, but the children then arrive without knowing anything about methodology and simply copy texts from the showcases, in the belief that they can "think" later. Questions occasionally do no more than indicate that the teacher has not visited the Museum before, as when they ask about Arawak-speaking groups, about "Caribs", or about the names of officials.

Children under the age of 12 are allowed into the Museum free, but if they come on Sundays, when admittance is free for everyone, they will find it so packed with people that they will not be able to complete their questionnaires.

To avoid tasks harming pupils' enjoyment as they tour the Museum, extensive information, of varying degrees of complexity, has been placed on this website, and teachers are encouraged to take full advantage of it (see the 'Pre-Hispanic Societies' section). Schoolchildren are given a free leaflet, containing brief details of the archaeological regions referred to in the exhibition.

Possibly the best task is for youngsters to visit the Museum and to register in their minds what they liked most, so that they can discuss this later in class with the teacher and their classmates.