{"id":1263,"date":"2009-11-27T15:34:56","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T23:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/27\/let-the-children-do-dangerous-things"},"modified":"2009-11-27T18:34:12","modified_gmt":"2009-11-28T02:34:12","slug":"let-the-children-do-dangerous-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/27\/let-the-children-do-dangerous-things","title":{"rendered":"Let the Children Do Dangerous Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years ago I posted this essay<\/a> about being a kid in the mid-20th century, and reflected upon it later in this post<\/a>. I think it’s a dreadful mistake that in an attempt to protect children from injury and disappointment we’re preventing them from learning skills with basic tools, learning how to explore without specific goals, learning how to deal with the unknown without fear, and learning how to overcome obstacles on their own. Hence I was both happy and sad when I ran across this video:<\/p>\n

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It made me happy because I completely agree with what Mr. Tulley is attempting to accomplish with his Tinkering School. It made me sad because teaching kids to tinker shouldn’t be seen as unusual. Tinkering was pretty much a way of life for me as a child, presumably because I come from a long line of tinkerers. Tinkering wasn’t their profession as such; they had job descriptions like Carpenter, Engineer, and Microscopist, but tinkering was what they did.<\/p>\n

If I and Mr. Tulley can’t convince you of the importance of letting kids tinker, consider the following passage from this article from TIME<\/a> about over-parenting:<\/p>\n

Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play \u2014 who has a treehouse above his office \u2014 recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids \u2014 they’d taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models \u2014 JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants’ play backgrounds into interviews.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or, to be even more concrete about it: today I replaced a failing fan in the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the fileserver. I was able to do this not because of the years I spent studying electrical engineering at a university, but because I took stuff apart and put stuff together when I was a kid. I knew everything I needed to know to fix that UPS long before I arrived at college. Without that knowledge that UPS probably would have gone into the landfill, even though it works perfectly aside from the fan, and I would have had to spend ~$100 to replace it rather than $11 for a new fan.<\/p>\n

Yes, there are (or can be) danergous voltages inside a UPS. Yes, you have to be careful about working on things powered from wall sockets. How do you learn how to not zap yourself? You don’t learn by studying electrical engineering–it’s too late. You have to learn how to be sensible around electrical circuits, and sharp edges, and hot things, and things that can poke your eyes out or burn holes in your jeans long before you’re of college age. You have to learn them as a kid. And that means that parents have to let their kids do dangerous things. Mr. Tulley puts it better than I:<\/p>\n

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I did all of those things when I was a kid. (I particularly like the bit about pocket knives. Pocket knives are the single most useful tool that you can carry in your pocket, and I still remember the first one that my father gave to me.) I think I turned out okay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years ago I posted this essay about being a kid in the mid-20th century, and reflected upon it later in this post. I think it’s a dreadful mistake that in an attempt to protect children from injury and disappointment we’re preventing them from learning skills with basic tools, learning how to explore without specific… Continue reading Let the Children Do Dangerous Things<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1264,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions\/1264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studionebula.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}