I want to go to The Tinkering School. Or at least go home, crack open a few small appliances, and poke around at their insides.

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in a cafe. Yesterday I made my way home in the rain from our final Elementary Camping Club overnight of the semester. I was wet, tired and very pleased with the way the campout had gone.

Free exploration in wild places.

I’ve felt for a while that having opportunities like camping out are important for young kids. I feel that the time I spent in wild spaces growing up really helped develop elements of myself that I continue to value today. Certainly a lot of the wonder and delight I take from natural environments, and the confidence and connectedness I feel when wandering them, must be traceable to extensive such experiences in childhood. A few years ago my friend Kenny Peavy passed me an article that surveyed something like 50 prominent environmentalists from around the world. The study sought in part to explore what these individuals considered to be the inspiration for their efforts, to what they traced their environmental commitment and ethic. What it found, and what stuck with me, was that without exception, they attributed their passions, at least in part, to extended unstructured time exploring and playing in wild spaces, while growing up. I once read a quotable quote along the lines of “we only protect what we love”. Clearly, this theory is at work here.

Hiking to our campsite on Friday I asked a 9-year old student if she’d ever camped before. “Yes”, she answered, “at my soccer camp…. Except we stayed in cabins and had suitcases.” As far as I understood, her experience of “camping” was staying at a hotel, or a lodge or something. The “Last Child in the Woods: Nature Deficit Disorder” factor, coined by author Richard Louv, seems a very real risk here.

This afternoon, I watched Gever Tulley‘s TED Talk: 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do. Gever is the founder of The Tinkering School I mentioned above. It’s an institution that he describes as a place for kids to go and work with tools to build all the things they imagine. In his talk, he speaks a lot about the stringency of child safety limits, and the prolificacy of warnings. He looks at the sterilization of risk in the environments we build for children and asks “where does the elimination of poky bits stop?”, and “what happens when a child raised without experience of poky bits, first encounters them?” His premise is that our enforcement of safety precautions limits opportunities for children to learn to navigate dangers.

It was when he started listing his five dangerous things kids should do in the talk, that the connections to my school camping club started firing.

#1 on his list was: Play With Fire. Tulley argues that playing with fire as a child is our first chance to control this mysterious elemental force, and a pivotal moment that can only be achieved by fooling around on a child’s own terms, which also teaches some basic scientific concepts.

Playing with fire: A difficult time for adults to allow kids to experiment.

Beginning our Camping Club last year was my first experience, since becoming an educator, of watching children play with fire. Sitting around the campfire, I watched the fascination, the intensity of focus and the compulsion for experimentation that overcame students as they poked with logs, crushed embers and lit then extinguished sticks.  Again and again I suppressed the adult urge to offer safety precautions. Many times I winced as I watched flames pass close to flammables. I think I did intervene momentarily, once or twice, but it was a real personal struggle to allow most of it to play out unmanaged.

Lighting Matches: Amazing to see how fearful of matches students who'd never lit one before were, and how quickly their confidence and experimentation grew.

This struggle to micromanage kids lives, whether for safety, to “maximize the use of their learning time”, or for whatever other justification is something that I really confront in these kinds of situations. Arriving at the campground, as soon as the kids had pitched their tents, they vanished. Some played in the tents, content in the little spaces of their control and creation. Some ran off and climbed trees. It was several hours before they returned to where we, the supervisors, were sitting chatting, and “supervising”.

Climbing Trees = Balance, strength, confidence and skinned knees.

I’d planned for a range of activities, but in the end all my scavenger hunt papers and survival game materials stayed in my bag. It had been tempting to call the kids over and rally them around an activity. Some of them, no doubt, would have appreciated it, as they struggled more than others to make their own fun amongst the trees. But it would have meant taking away the unstructured, unmanaged time. It would have meant setting external parameters, and softening the intellectual, physical and emotional dangers and risks of climbing, inventing and problem-solving that they encountered when independent in the woods.

I find that in my role as an adult and an educator, my default is to question and compel students, towards some end. It takes a very conscious effort for me to allow them to experience dangers. But I worry that unless I do, they’ll never know learn how to navigate them.