Sheecago

Chicago, like many big cities, has something called a City Pass. For about seventy dollars, you get a booklet that includes tickets to six of the cities most popular attraction. It’s sold as a “Convenient Ticket to Everything” type deal, and gives tourists reason (and a compelling one at that; they’ve spent money already) to see Navy Pier, the Field, the Shedd, MSI, the Adler and a few other big, impressive buildings that hold within their doors some big, impressive things to take pictures of.

They are neat things for a few reasons: primarily, they bring myriad landmarks to the average city tourist; they make that daunting obligation of feeling you need to see everything, everything, and everything! in a vacation easier to fulfill. It’s price effective; using the three tickets on the Museum Campus (Field, Shedd, Adler) alone makes it worth the booklet price. They provide an anchor for daily planning, as tourists often mold an entire day around the tickets within the book. Everyone deserves to see these things, and perhaps would be too intimated to indulge in their touristy glamour if it were not for the City Pass.

But there’s a big problem with these “Problem Solving” books. They’ve become too effective.

It’s the Season Pass Phenomena. The very thing that made your mother furious when she bought you the Sunsplash Summer Pass in seventh grade; the same reason you only ski until noon when you have a season pass at a ski resort; the same reason you find yourself eating at weird places that are totally out of the way when you buy an Entertainment Book every fall. You have the tickets, so 1) you don’t need to spend the whole day getting your money’s worth and 2) you must redeem every discounted ticket included in the booklet.

So instead of spending an entire day (which is less than it deserves anyway) sauntering around one of the coolest natural history museums in the country, the Field, looking at the dinos, the fossils, the evolution exhibits, the shells, the animals, the fish, the Native American stuff, the shoes, all that…instead of giving one building the time it deserves, families with the City Pass feel compelled to hit the Field, the Shedd and the Adler in one afternoon. It’s a no-win situation really. Then the next day might be spent at Navy Pier, on the Water Taxi, in the Hancock.

What this does is one of two things. It either: piques the interest of kids at one museum (Wow, Mother, look at how the coral reef actually is alive, as opposed to being dormant like I once that it was) and then before there’s enough time to let it all absorb, the parents drag the family (often sweaty, sometimes identifiable by 37 strollers and child leashes and gift bags with overpriced stuffed animas) to the next museum in the queue. And as much as I love educational opportunities, see the value in exposing kids to a variety of stimulation, I can see no benefit in giving them a periphery, very, very shallow introduction to these museums, thereby depriving them of any real connections.

Education needs to be internalized. We need to feel like we discovered something, that

we own a little bit of the museum, that we read something, learned something, saw something that makes our newly acquired knowledge extraordinary. But when an eight year old is up from 9-6 (to maximize time and money, of course) sprinting from buses to museums to new, special exhibits to shows to gift shops to cafes to bathrooms it’s more disastrous than it is effective. That kind of internalization does not happen. Instead, we have cranky kids, cranky parents, a brief introduction to a whole bunch of stuff, and more likely than not, touristy snapshots taken in front of some statues and plaques that mean nothing to people. It makes sense why it happens; parents want to be the best parents they can; parents have tickets to everything; everything is so convenient, we don’t have a lot of time in this city. But slow down. Take a breath. Don’t feel obligated to do everything. Why order a buffet and walk away feeling bloated, when you could get by on soup and a salad?

I work in a museum (and one that is at the end of the Museum Campus, which means that we usually get a rush of people at the end of the day who visit as the last stop on their whirlwind museum tour). And I can securely say that nobody deserves this chaos. It’s admirable, parents, to want to treat your kids to the most and the best and to teach them smart spending by utilizing fully the City Pass. But kids don’t need all the stimulation…in one day. It’s too much. Slow down. Saunter instead of speed walk. Read plaques, touch things, take museum tours, sit and look and breathe – and dedicate a whole day to one place. That’s when the learning happens.