No more “Tinkering”
A couple years ago I took note of a story of a school district that banned Recess – games that did not have written rules to them. This is sort of in league with schools dumping the fabled “Monkey Bars”, but a bit more insiduous. Getting rid of “Monkey Bars” is, theoretically designed to rid us of various kiddie injuries. Regulating recess games is what I called a “School Bans Calvin-Ball” — the school district was moralizing the children’s play time and preparing them for the business-world — and god help me if I knew the intricacies of “Freeze Tag” or “Cartoon Tag” or if my daily games of soccer really and truly had rather malleable rules to them. (Or, for that matter, another fond recess memory from grade school: setting ants with the aid of a magnifying glass.)
Here is a story from Wired proposing the hypothesis that the “War on Meth” is destroying a type of childhood Scientific Inquiry. I don’t know what you can do with pounds of chemicals, but we say goodbye to Dexter as a childhood role-model. I remember hearing a fellow high school student murmur a bit angrily at a Science teacher who apparently said to her that “she was unlike her” either father or brother, I don’t remember which, because “she did not tinker around with things”. This teacher had a somewhat moreass sense of things, seeming to think that the quality of students in his midst was generally in a downward trend, and that this student’s elder father member “tinkered” with things in his spare time and she was content to do or not do other things was in keeping with his character. I generally liked him, and his thinly veiled (at least to me) commentaries on, for example, Creationists that he apparently had to deal with. For his part he apparently was bumping up against some of the “dissappearance of the Chem Lab” that the Wired Magazine is discussing, in that he apparently had some fights with members of the community on the safety concerns of this or that lab experiment.
On the other hand, it was in poor sport for this teacher to compare the student to her family member. I suggest that today’s problem is that if we have a kid in a make-shift labortory, it’ll be easy to suspect he (or she) is busy creating explosive devices for use later on for rather sinister Columbine-like reasons. At any rate, Calvin Ball is out. Childhood labortories are out. And the nation is experiencing a vaguely defined state of perpetual brain-deadness. Our educational system is in perpetual crisis, or so I’ve heard.