Museon is a museum for science

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

 and culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

 in The Hague

The Hague

The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...

, Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

. It has collections in the domains of geology, biology, archaeology, history, science and ethnology.

Origin

The museum was initiated in 1904 by the newspaper director Frits van Paasschen, who wanted to establish a museum where children could learn about industry. Although science and technology became important domains for the museum, the original idea has never been realized. Under the museum’s first director, the geologist Herman van Cappelle, the collection policy moved towards natural history and ethnology.
Van Paasschen’s idea of a museum with a strong education mission however was implemented from the very beginning, expressed by the museum’s previous name ‘Museum for Education’. From the start the museum organised lessons for school classes, based on the visual tools that are provided by the museum’s collection. Around 1910 the museum was also the first organisation in The Netherlands that programmed educational movies, an initiative that led to the foundation of the first school cinema in the country.

Municipal museum

Starting as a private museum the ‘Museum for Education’ was taken over by the municipality of The Hague in 1920. In 1933, biologist Niko Tinbergen, provided the museum with a collection of objects from the Inuit in Greenland. The museum moved several times, until the municipality had its present building built in 1985, by the design by architect WG Quist. The name Museon also dates from 1985. In 1997 the museum was privatised again.

Mission

Museon hosts educational exhibitions and programmes to communicate with a broad audience. A large part of all visitors are school children. Museon aims at transferring knowledge about man and his relation with nature and culture and provides easily accessible information about topical themes and developments in science and society. Currently the collection counts around 260,000 objects.

External links

• Museon web site