Vierzon (France) (AFP)

If museums remain closed to children due to the health crisis, why shouldn't they invite themselves into schools?

In the Cher, several of them go to meet students during discovery sessions.

It is 9:00 am at the Tunnel-Château de Vierzon school.

The CP-CE1 of Amandine Lacroix sit quietly at the end of a small room cleared for the occasion.

They listen with curiosity.

On the tables covered with a purple tablecloth, Caroline Jaget has placed four objects brought from the Vierzon Museum.

The cultural mediator gives the instructions: "We observe with the eyes and not with the ...?"

"Hands!", The thirteen children answer in unison.

Educational booklet and pencils in hand, they are distributed around the objects: a knight bottle from the Denbac Manufacture (early 20th century), a station master's lamp (early 20th century), a glass candle holder (late 19th century) and a dog earthenware from the Manufacture Berlot-Mussier (1930s).

Objects from the museum's collection dedicated to the industrial past of the city, which still housed many factories in the mid-1990s.

Until recess, the pupils draw and observe.

Then comes the break time.

Salutary.

"Recreation is welcome. Two hours is a long time!" Breathes the assistant to the mediator Yohann Blin, in master's management of heritage.

Fortunately for the trainee, the students come back much calmer after having let off steam in the courtyard.

Station master's lamp in hand, the student then launches the debates.

We are talking about objects.

The material, the function, the manufacture, the time, everything goes.

The enthusiasm of the children is there.

“So where were these objects made?” Asks the mediator.

"At the museum!", Tries a student.

"No, in factories in Vierzon!", Answers the adult.

“Was it a long, long time ago?” Asks another enthusiastic child.

"We raise our finger before speaking", reframes the teacher, in support of the speakers.

"To make people discover culture, it's interesting," she then reckons.

"The pupils are interested. It is usually a very active class, and there they are concentrated."

-Meet a work-

"It's an opening onto art that they don't have at home," she continues.

"They don't necessarily have this culture of going to the museum".

And that is the aim of the operation: to continue opening up children to local heritage, despite the Covid-19.

The primary of the Tunnel Château is not the only one to house a museum.

Several schools in the department have also taken the plunge.

The Berry Museum is thus invited to Saint-Doulchard, Bourges and La Guerche-sur-l'Aubois, ditto for the Saint-Vic Museum in Saint-Amand-Montrond.

"Classes cannot go to the museum, so I said to myself: why not imagine the version for the period we are going through?", Explains Brigitte Bardolle, educational advisor for the academic inspectorate of Cher, at the origin of this initiative.

"We work in three directions," explains this plastic arts teacher who usually takes care of the Artothèque, a mobile museum that moves its collection of 160 paintings and engravings to the classroom.

"The first is the meeting of a work", then "the meeting of the museum and its mission" and finally the moment when the children "appropriate the object, its characteristics, its details as well as its material. ".

In the Vierzon school, the goal seems to have been reached.

The pupils have discovered objects, materials, trades and the museum is no longer this large building "next to the cinema" as a child described it at the start of the session.

Everyone now wants to find out.

"I want to go there to see lots of things because I have never been there", says a little girl.

"I want to see a lot of things that I have not seen yet", abounds his friend in quilts.

"I want to see other objects!", Calls in turn a boy.

"To see old things," added another ... after raising his finger.

© 2021 AFP