Watch this! (You might need to wait half a minute for it to load.) 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do is a brief, but terrifically interesting talk by Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School where kids "play with power tools!" I found this on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) site with really fascinating stuff from their annual conference - somewhere in California, of course.
The part that got me, even though I don't have any kids in grade school at my house, is thinking about whether I would let those kids (if I had em) do this stuff. Even better, is thinking about whether you ever did any of this stuff yourself before you got to high school - not counting the Internet stuff if you were born before, say 1985.
Question at the end: does this really teach kids to be safer and more self-reliant in today's scary world?
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Nice link! It is important to get children to learn to use their initiative and that guy is helping to do that.
ReplyDeleteHi Mom, I like your new blog! The Da Vinci Code is going great for me - I'm a few years behind on reading it but better late than never!
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ReplyDeleteknife-check w/asterisk
spear-playing catch should count here, right?
appliance-check
drive car-check
oo! thanks for the post! I'm going to blog on it too--so check that out later :)
when my kids were little, a friend lent me a book about A.S. Neill's school, Summerhill. His byword for children was "freedom not license." He advocated letting even small children use very sharp knives to cut things so that they would appreciate good tools and learn how to use them safely. i can't remember how far we went with this, but it seemed a good idea to give children many such learning experiences. there is still a Summerhill school in England, I think. Your post reminded me of this...
ReplyDeletewow...that's a cool video! and i've never heard of TED before. i'm going to find out more and then put it on my links. had to laugh at #5 "drive a car"....uncle gene taught me how to drive when i was about 9 or 10 in just the way you see in the video. at first, i'd sit on his lap and work the gear shift and steering wheel while he worked the gas, clutch, and brakes. and then i could do it all myself. it used to be legal in ND for kids to drive a car as long as they were big enough to work the pedals and see out the windshield at the same time--and as long as they didn't go on major highways. lots of kids drove lunch and water out to their dads in the fields or drove into town to pick up something from the store.
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