Kjellquist Blog

As if we didn’t have enough hurtles for student science creativity here is another. From this blog

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve standing over the metal cabinet of my Chemcraft chemistry set,….

Mine too

In Texas, you need to register the purchase of Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers. The same state where I do not have to register a handgun, forces me to register a glass beaker.

Right-on, I guess he’s never tried to buy a drink in Texas.

For example, when a current company tried re releasing a kit based on the one marketed by Mr. Wizard himself back in the 1950s, they found that they could only include five of the original chemicals in the set. The rest of the items were replaced with inane things like super balls and balloons.

Not a Mr. Wizard set!

Now all rocket engines above a certain size and thrust limit require fingerprinting, background checks and waving of your search and seizure rights! Said engines often require a Low Explosive Usage Permit to launch or take them across state lines.

Of course, we all know how good background checks are (ala Virginia Tech) maybe we can buy the motors in Philly?

Finally, checkout the

…picture of a home chemistry lab in Fort Myers, Florida. A lab full of unlicensed glassware and chemicals that would break all sorts of rules, and arouse untold suspicion and maybe even be shutdown by the powers that be. It’s a good thing the war on science is a relatively new phenomenon… Because that’s the home chemistry lab of Thomas Alva Edison.

What a said state of affairs!

An Update
When I posted these same comments on my company blog, I received a comment from a fellow employee who posted the following comment

I agree that it is sad that so many of the traditional methods of learning are now deemed too dangerous for kids.

If you want to be depressed even more (and who doesn’t?), check out this article from the Daily Mail. It’s about how kids are given less and less freedom to explore the world outside of their back yards. Check out the map.

This article is right on……. I grew up in the new suburbs after WWII and we roamed all over our neighborhood as kids. It seemed like huge distances but in reality it was a mile or 2. But we kids were totally unsupervised, and explored every field, lot and wooded area. We organized our selves into “gangs” and got into petty mischief. Of course, with most of the neighbors knowing at least 1 of us on sight we couldn’t get away with much. However, a huge difference back then was that most mothers DIDN’T work so the neighborhood was occupied during the day. I even remember (as a young child) the neighborhood mothers all getting together on summer afternoons to gossip at different houses. Kinda the equivalent of the row home front step. We kids were all dragged along of course. This was in the VERY early days of TV; some had it, some didn’t and nobody had central air conditioning! The soap operas would go off and TV was not on again until “prime time”. Yes, I actually remember when TV was not broadcast all day long! This actually changed pretty quickly but with parents that didn’t grow up with TV pure social interaction was valued.