Oh, yes............yes, yes

LOVE THIS PIECE IN MY LATEST READING ABOUT THE OPPENHEIMERS..........this is taken from the book about Frank who, after many struggles, opened the EXPLORATORIUM MUSEUM in San Francisco:

'Frank Oppenheimer’s teaching experience at the University of Colorado convinced him that young people had become dangerously removed from the real stuff of their own surroundings and desperately needed to reconnect. His students were strangely incurious. Most of them had little experience with the natural world and few opportunities to build intuition  about it. They hadn’t climbed trees and collected rocks and fiddled with motors. The result was that they showed up at their courses not knowing why they were. He thought this was a scandal. “Their experience was so meager, their whole contact withy the natural world so restricted, that I thought a place was needed where they could walk through a kind of woods of natural phenomena.”

Like a lot of us of certain age, I can remember as a child being sent outside to play. We explored neighborhoods and built forts or dollhouses out of mud and sticks, climbed trees and watched clouds, played hide and seek and threw stones. We made model cars or planes, flew kites, dressed dolls, played house or tag. We chased dogs and cats, drew on sidewalks, played cricket and soccer in the streets. No one told us what to notice.

Our eyes, needless to say, were a lot more open before we became shackled to our schedules.

Whether kids were happier or more productive in those days, I can’t say. But, unmistakably, both children and adults were engaged in one-on-one contact with the world in a way that is almost impossible to achieve today, even for those who spend substantial time and money to try to make it happen.

In many senses, the tangible reality that used to be our playground no longer exists: that university of experience has been lost to television and computers and lessons and packaged entertainment and education, and also to the increased fears (often real) associated with wandering freely, poking your nose into things just for the heck of it.

And that has enormous consequences for science – as well as for the development of intuition and critical thinking skills in general. There was something about dealing with the real physical world that left you not only better informed but more grounded, more centered – less likely to be swayed by insubstantial claims or fluffy nonsense.'

Something incredibly wonderful happens – Frank Oppenheimer and the World he made up.

K.C Cole

Pages 148/149