Experience heritage with Historical Gold!

How it was, how it is, how it will be'. That is the broad description of heritage education we work with at Historical Gold. In fact, heritage education allows students to explore and discover the depth of time. Not only do they learn to reflect on the past, developing skills such as historical thinking and reasoning, but they also learn about their own environment. What is under my feet here? What people lived here before me? What was life like back then? Think of the past as one big coloring page, the history lesson provides the lines of the past: what were the main events and what time periods were there? Heritage education gives color to this coloring page. Inside or outside these lines. Because through heritage education, children learn what life was like for people in a particular time and why we need to preserve some things and traditions for the future. By empathizing with, and reflecting on the past, children also understand the present much better and develop into people who are aware about why heritage is important to preserve for the future. This interplay between present, past and future makes heritage education a rich form of cultural education in which a cross-curricular approach in collaboration with other subjects or other cultural disciplines occurs naturally. Think of world orientation, drama, music or citizenship. Heritage education usually takes place outside the classroom: in one's own town or village. In a museum or perhaps in nature. In these places you come into direct contact with heritage and the experience for the learners is much greater. We call this the direct heritage confrontation. 

At Historical Gold, we have been working with this direct heritage confrontation for years. Every student who comes to our museum for the first time is impressed by the bathhouse or the castle. A place where you feel, experience and see the past. In The Roman Museum we tell the story of Roman South Limburg and the role of the bathhouse in it. At Hoensbroek Castle we immerse the students in the past of this beautiful castle. Exactly: the story of our own environment. About people like you and me who also lived here, but 500, 1000 and even 2000 years ago. People with the same challenges in life as us. Our museum classes and workshops are designed precisely so that students explore and experience the past. No boring tours with guides who talk for hours, but active forms of work: touching objects, empathizing with people of the past, smelling ingredients we have long since stopped using and listening to sounds in the bathhouse. 

Behind the scenes, we are working on our new museum: the Roman Museum. In this museum, in the future, we will be able to tell even more stories about those people who lived, worked and lived here. People who perhaps used the bathhouse on a daily basis. And in this place we hope that students will come to discover and experience their own past: a rich place with so many stories about how it was, how it is and how it will be. We are also currently working on the public opening of the Schelment Tower. Because the bathhouse, the castle, the Schementoren and all those rich stories about life in this city and region deserve a place in the future to let even more students color the coloring page with the colors and lines that fit their own imagination.