Saw a pointer to this essay from Doc Searls blog.
I mourn for the children of today. Parents seemingly scared or maybe not wanting to appear as Not Good Parents and thus over compensate. If you are scared about life, I believe you shouldn’t make it such that you raise a bunch of risk averse people. This is why progress is very slow. I used to be very risk averse. I didn’t want to mess things up. This attribute made me learn much much slowly (with respect to programming). The discovery of dynamic languages helped me gain confidence in breaking systems. This is why 2007 me is very different 2010 me (wrt to programming and most other things). I now think that ask for forgiveness later. Hope I can apply this to different parts of my life. Fake courage. Fail. Learn.Live!!!
But before we could play, we had to check the ice. We became serious junior meteorologists, true connoisseurs of cold. We learned that the best weather for pond skating is plain, clear cold, with starry nights and no snow. (Snow not only mucks up the skating surface but also insulates the ice from the colder air above.) And we learned that moving water, even the gently flowing Mystic River, is a lot less likely to freeze than standing water. So we skated only on the pond. We learned all the weird whooping and cracking sounds that ice makes as it expands and contracts, and thus when to leave the ice.
Do kids learn these things today? I don't know. How would they? We don't even let them. Instead, we post signs. Ruled by lawyers, cities and towns everywhere try to eliminate their legal liability. But try as they might, they cannot eliminate the underlying risk. Liability is a social construct; risk is a natural fact. When it is cold enough, ponds freeze. No sign or fence or ordinance can change that.
In fact, by focusing on liability and not teaching our kids how to take risks, we are making their world more dangerous. When we were children, we had to learn to evaluate risks and handle them on our own. We had to learn, quite literally, to test the waters. As a result, we grew up to be more savvy about ice and ponds than any kid could be who has skated only under adult supervision on a rink.
via Chris Daly’s Blog: How the Lawyers Stole Winter: Thoughts on journalism and journalism history..
ipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.