… if I lived in the San Fran area. Gever Tulley’s “Tinkering School” encourages kids to play with pocket knives, power tools, and fire. It also requires that kids take apart various household appliances just to figure out how they work. And, my personal favorite — kids get to drive cars. (Our own Tim Lee will be tickled by the portion of the camp where the kids are encouraged to break the DMCA by learning how to rip and repackage music, although I can’t imagine they really need much encouragement from adults to do that!)
The reason I found this idea for a summer camp so refreshing when I heard about it on NPR this week is because I have spent the better part of the last few months signing endless liability waiver forms for my daughter’s summer camps, including the tennis camp she’s in right now. After all, don’t you know how dangerous flying tennis balls can be!! And my kids like to swim at a local pool that not only has endless waiver forms and rules, but also no high diving boards for fear of liability from scumbag trial lawyers.
We have become a nation of over-protective wusses. As Tulley points out in his great little lecture below on “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do,” we practically wrap our kids in bubble wrap before we send them out the door to play these days — assuming we let them out the door at all. It’s crazy. Our kids need to be experiencing life, the elements, and yes, a little danger. I have already started teaching my kids how to use power tools and they are both under the age of 8. One of my wussy yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails and saws and he thought I was nuts. But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest to God manual labor when they get older).
Anyway, enjoy this video. If this guy starts a camp on the East Coast, I am putting my kids on the waiting list.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.