The Wired article about chemistry sets is spreading slowly through the geeknet. It is becoming an example of the struggle between structured and unstructured education. Dan Smith, on Slashdot, writes:

One of the things that has bothered me for a long time is that educators and policy-makers don’t seem to understand the crucial educational role of unstructured, unsupervised, childrens’ activity, from, say, about age 7 to 14.

It’s bothered me, too, but it bothers me more that even parents are becoming more and more worried about their children having time to play on their own.

I often think the most underrated social injustice is the different self-educational opportunities available to kids who live in a house with a basement versus kids that live in an apartment.

My basement was an upstairs room in our barn at first. After we moved I had my own room. When we first moved into that house, there was a window that we couldn’t get to, directly between the sides of a peaked roof. We (my dad, that is) took out the wall that had to lead to this space, and converted what had been an unused and inaccessible attic space into a small bedroom. There wasn’t a lot of space between those slanted ceilings, but there was enough for a desk (where I did a lot of writing), a ham radio, and a used TRS-80 Model I on which I first learned to play around with programming.

Chemistry experiments were saved for our new, spacious basement. It had a bar space with a sink that washed away quite a few smelly chemistry experiments.

Dan’s posting reminds me of something Andrew Weil^• said in The Natural Mind^•:

These changes in point of view cannot happen overnight, for they require acceptance of painful truths: that children daydreaming in class, for example, might be using their minds much more profitably than children paying attention.

Free play is an extraordinarily important part of a child’s growth, and it’s something they’re losing year by year. Part of the problem is that people today want reward without work. Creativity without destruction. But creativity is dangerous.

I wonder if there will come a day when programming and scripting experimentation will be considered too dangerous.