Two science museums have opened up during the last year in downtown Raleigh, N.C.. My wife's employer put significant funds into both, and thus has held parties at each of these new cultural hot spots. We took full advantage of these opportunities, strolling the grounds to see what kids today might be learning.

The first one, Exploris, is a private venture built with some public help. It's intended for kids and has a lot of "hands-on" exhibits that don't do much. For example, a water pump is used to show how water is pulled out of the ground. Nice, I guess, except that the pump pumps water out of one bucket and into another. And any kids with two eyes can see this. Not exactly exciting. After pumping for a few seconds, I got bored. The same thing went for most of the Exploris exhibits. There just wasn't much to them. On the plus side, there's a picture of the world made out of marbles and other vaguely funky art pieces, most of them made out of steel or aluminum. It's never too early to expose children to the wonders of abstract metal art.

Exploris opened about a year ago. At this point, the biggest impact it has had is with its charter school, which holds recess in Moore Square Park. Until recently, this park has been better-known as a homeless congregating point. Once the homeless folks figured out that the kids wouldn't hand out quarters, they moved to other spots downtown. I'm not sure which is better for the park, rich suburban kids or homeless folks. Kind of a toss up there.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has been around since forever, but it just built a new building and provisionally opened its doors a couple of months ago. Down here in the New South, public museums like to open and close special exhibitions with 24-hour bashes. Barbara and I wandered over the Natural History round-the-clock shindig (which came complete with bands, sausages and cheese fries), and even at two in the morning the line was more than a thousand people long. Something like 50,000 people toured the museum that first 24 hours. Not bad. But we didn't stand in line. Had better things to do.

So we didn't check the new digs out until this weekend, when her employer had its summer party at the museum. The food was served on the mall outside the museum, and we had four hours to wander around the exhibits (food and drink prohibited within the exhibits themselves, of course).

You may have heard of this museum. It's the one that has a dinosaur with a fossilized heart. Oh, the rest of the dinosaur is fossilized as well. A living 10-foot lizard with a fossil heart would be damned impressive. Anyway, most of the rest of the exhibits are dioramas portraying life in the three climatic and geological zones (coastal savanna, piedmont hills and mountains).

I hate dioramas. You know, where there's a few trees, some moss and a plastic snake thrown into the plastic brush. No matter how much care is taken to make the scene look "realistic," it always looks fake. There's got to be a way to show kids this stuff without using dioramas. Don't ask me what that is, but dioramas have been around for centuries. Someone has to have a new idea.

There were bones, of course, dinosaur and otherwise. The most impressive (and astonishing) was the ground sloth, a 20-foot tall critter that liked to eat trees. Literally. One of its claws was as big as my forearm. This was one hell of a critter. And it only went extinct a few thousand years ago. Yeah, that was a diorama, but it was also real critter bones. Reality helps.

The thing is, both of these museums, created at the cost of hundreds of millions of public dollars and private donations, aren't very good. Exploris is really shallow. It doesn't really have much to offer in terms of real knowledge, and I can't see how it would excite many kids about science. Most of my friends who have been there tend to agree. I haven't interviewed kids about this, but the ones at the party generally seemed bored as they walked around. Though maybe that was because it was past their bedtimes or something.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences had plenty of substance behind its exhibits, but it didn't always share that knowledge, preferring to slap simplistic and sometimes inaccurate information into short paragraphs. Particularly strange was an explanation of nor'easters, which stated that the term was named for the strong northwest winds created by the storm.

Excuse me?

This sort of critique sounds nit-picky, I know, but it's important for the museums to get things right. Another example: The walls of the rock room are made up of some sort of styrofoam or other artificial product. the stuff rings hollow when you knock on it. There is a sign on the wall of these fake walls stating that they are made out of igneous rock from someplace in North Carolina. A little girl went up to the wall, tapped it, and kept saying to her mother, "I didn't know rocks were supposed to be hollow." Some are, of course, but not these. Kids can smell fake a mile away. And those dioramas? Totally fake.

The problem is that most science and natural history museums are set up in much the same way. Exploris, which touts itself as a "new" sort of museum "experience," isn't much different than the new Museum of Natural Sciences. Both just left me feeling disappointed. I didn't thrill to the thought of soaring with pteranodons and I didn't wish I was a beaver making a dam across a small stream. Alright, the ground sloth was pretty cool, but right next to it (literally) was a weird scene right out of Little House on the Prairie, with a mother in a calico bonnet and children playing in a field. I never did quite figure out what that was all about. Most of the kids wandering around with us seemed to feel the same way. After a few minutes with the sloth, they turned around, saw these white "settler" types, shrugged their shoulders and moved on. All the grandeur of the sloth was burned off in a second.

I like science, and I know a few folks who are involved in science. The biggest complaint they (and I) have is that kids just don't seem interested in the stuff. Well, with museums like these, I don't blame the kids. These institutions of "science" just don't stir the soul.

At the age of five, Jon Worley ruled out a scientific life. In all the books he read, scientists used slide rules. He had never seen one and thus concluded that science was beyond his reach.