BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

If you go The next Cincinnati Art Museum Family Day is Saturday, Sept. 20, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The free event is part of the Tribes of Buffalo exhibit. For information, 721-5204.

It's always nice to hear the pitter-patter of feet. Especially 24,862 pairs of them.

For years, the Cincinnati Art Museum was more accustomed to the clicking of high heels or the padding of loafers. Now its marble floors are being happily unshined by sneakers and strollers.

Teachers and moms and dads are rediscovering the museum in a big new way, and it is glad news for all of us.

This year, 520 school groups - with nearly 25,000 students - toured the museum, an increase of 7,000 children from last year.

The museum's fiscal year ends tomorrow, so it has recently been counting heads. There are so many more to count. More than 250,000 people visited the museum - second only to the blockbuster 1982 season with the Treasures from the Tower of London exhibit. Household membership is at an all-time high - 14,000 families, up 12 percent.

The news is certainly good for the local arts community, but it is even better for families, and best of all for children.

Research shows that the primary reason families come to a museum is the opportunity to interact with their kids. In the age of interactive video, it's nice to know there are still interactive families. Some of us were beginning to wonder.

For instance, what talks at a movie? Fast food means hold the pickles and the chatter. Amusement parks are fine, but hardly the place for big people and little people to discuss much beyond the length of lines and the choice or pizza or tacos.

But paintings and sculpture, not to mention marble floors, grand staircases and cavernous lobbies elicit delicious questions.

A blue-haired man

Put a child in front of Chagall's Red Rooster with a blue-haired man floating across the sky, and see what pops out of his mouth. Even toddlers are drawn to Roualt's bright, heavily lined clown.

One finds, as one indulges in the museum's family programs, that children who trick-or-treat in its galleries (honest, they do), or make their own pistachio-shell family portraits in Phillips Hall, begin to think of the museum as their own.

Later, when they think back to the experiences that shaped their lives, they'll remember color and creativity, not just Dalmatian movies and Beanie Babies.

Like similar institutions across the country, the museum has started not only courting families and school children in a big way, but redefining what it means by ''education programs.''

''It used to be, 'We'll tell you what you need to know,''' says Suzanne LeBlanc, curator of education. ''Now it's, 'We don't have all the answers. What do you want? What do you need to discover?'''

The art museum has managed this great trick, being aesthetically graceful and dramatic enough to make us feel we are on hallowed ground, but being friendly enough to welcome us with Saturday morning coffee and muffins.

Designing children

So give it a spin on a special family day. Phillips Hall is full of snipping, gluing, talking, designing children. They make art in the midst of great art, an idea that leaves their parents a bit awestruck, but seems perfectly reasonable to them.

Or encourage your child's teacher to sign up for a free one-hour, docent-led tour. First-graders can study Egyptian mummies and ancient Greek games. Seventh-graders can see how industrialization affected art.

Not only are the school tours without charge, but your child will come home with a free ''passport'' to take the whole family to the museum. On your second visit, he or she will get a treasure bag full of fun art surprises.

Such a deal.

If we want our children or grandchildren to grow up with beauty and creativity, we must take them to places where it exists.

If we are tired of rubbish kids' movies and major-league sports events with Little League manners, we must search out those oases of culture that emphasize the worth of the human spirit.

Today - and for the last 111 years - the Cincinnati Art Museum has been a very good place to start.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.

RAMSEY ARCHIVE