Tompa dismisses the idea, expressed on this blog too, that the ACE scheme represents the exploitation of children and their teachers to seek out potential new customers for coin dealers, though he makes only a half-hearted attempt to prove that the support of the ACE by US dealers is not commercially motivated. The other supporters of ACE itself are at least more open this than Tompa:
It’s hard to imagine a better way of building goodwill toward the hobby, or of recruiting well-informed and enthusiastic supporters.or
ACE’s “Take a Roman Emperor Home with You” is one tremendously popular and successful way to spread the word about the fascination of ancient coins among those who might never have dreamt of actually "owning" one.ACCG's Mark Lehman says: "We profoundly hope these coins will serve, as intended, as a sort of "dragons' teeth" seed, sown in the hope and expectation of raising a whole new generation of collectors [...]" (the dragons' teeth of the myth as we remember were to give rise to an invincible army). Elkins discusses the ethics of the use in "educational" programmes of "erdfrische" coins which current knowledge about the trade shows will include archaeological objects illicitly excavated and illegally exported from Bulgaria. Tompa dismisses the raising of these ethical issues as mere "propaganda" - but fails to see that the ACE itself is entirely geared towards providing propaganda for ancient coin collecting. In the process, the scheme is totally avoiding discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collection of archaeological material bought on the US market.
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It turns out there is another "coins in tehclassroom" scheme of almost identical nature run by the American Numismatic Association. The teacher here buys coins from a dealer, puts them in a sand tray, gets the sytudents dig them out with plastic spoons and fill in a "coin observation reord" form (not a stratigraphical record then?) and then look them up on dealers' websites to identify them. That is supposed to be teaching Amerkian kids something - apparently.
http://www.money.org/Content/ContentFolders/TeacherResources/LessonPlans/RomanCoinResearch.pdf
Alarming suggestions that by collecting coins, children can become "docents" in America http://haoodnla.com/article/lxy0921630y9j01/473325 are tempered somewhat by the discovery that the Webster's dictionary defines the term totally differently from its use over here in continental Europe. But it is more than just language which divides the US collector from the people of the source countries of the coiney collectable.
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