Abstract:

Museums play a big role in conserving, researching, and exhibiting cultural heritage, as well as in bringing cultural awareness and providing cultural education for the society. Being a non-formal education space, it contributes to developing and strengthening cultural learning experiences. The educational aspect of museums has been highly appreciated by schools in Latvia which with the support of the state programme “School Bag” involve the young people in the activities organized by the museums. Family visitors to museums, although traditionally being considered as a key audience, are rare, thus high-brow cultural consumption patterns push the museums to recognise the need for becoming more responsive to their widest audiences. The study is aimed at analysing the opinions on museum-going through the attitudes and perspectives of the representatives of three generations from 10 families interviewed in Latvia in 2019–2020 as a part of research on intergenerational dynamics of cultural socialisation. The analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews revealed that families rarely attend museums and predominantly choose only museums located near their places of residence. Neither in Latvia nor in other countries visiting museums during a family trip is the principal goal; this is only one of the alternative ways of spending leisure time and does not involve all family members. The majority of the interviewees admitted that they did not take full advantage of the vast cultural offer due to subjective and objective reasons: lack of interest, distrust in the quality of the performance, inability to combine job with the amount of work in the family, financial difficulties, exhaustion. In some cases, these are young people, especially students of higher education institutions, that choose visits to cultural-historical objects, also to museums, as places to spend their free time together with the family, thus recognizing the necessity for the continuity of an active cultural education process.

Acknowledgement:
This article is based on the research which has been conducted within a framework of the international project “Cultural Heritage and Identities of Europe's Future” (CHIEF), funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 770464.

Keywords:

Young people, family, culture, cultural education, cultural awareness, museums.