Voces del Prado

Distance Education Cabinet

Alicia Quintana Martínez, Head of the Education Service, 1983-2007

It's quite difficult, because teaching and enjoying art, which is the best way to learn about it, does not mix well with the many, it is something personal. Bringing these two things together is done best in the classroom, and then we can go to the Museum to see it.
We made it a point to take care of distance learning. Teachers would give their students their assignment, a specific painter. They could write to us and we would send them fact sheets on the painter and his works. For instance, one year they worked on Tintoretto. The people at the secretary's office opened the mail and they would say, "They want more info on Tintoretto", and the time came where we no longer had anything else to give them. I used to put on some headphones so that nobody interrupted me and wrote out more fact sheets. The type of work that was successful with those students was to make educational guides for the secondary education level, mostly, although we also made some for primary education. We made 50 educational factsheets, I wrote all of them, monographic sheets on artists, artistic styles, different topics, for instance, mythology in the Museum, sacred history in the Museum, kings and queens of Spain in the Museum, schools of painting such as the Italian or Flemish school, different stages of Spanish painting.
The factsheets that we sent out to the students we then used as materials which we classified by topics, subjects, schools. These publications were sold at the Museum, they were bought by teachers and students, and that way they could prepare the visits. Huge bunches of children are a terrible thing, especially when it became fashionable to bring in very young ones from pre-school. It's true that they weren't all that bad because they would come in line, taking each other by the hand, two by two. When teachers called in to say they were coming, I would tell them, "If they want to know, or if they want to learn and you want to teach them what a Museum is, take them to a smaller museum because here they'll be overtaken by the sheer size and absolutely lost." We were targeting older children, the ones in primary and secondary education levels.