Not surprisingly, the scientific literacy of Americans declines even further. How the decline of “tinkering” contributes to scientific illiteracy in the United States.
For many children, particularly boys, free play used to mean fiddling around with a chemistry set in the basement or lighting things on fire in the backyard. These days, with parents’ penchant for overscheduling their children, there is less time for such youthful experimentation.
This is not all bad – no doubt fewer children are getting hurt. But backyard tinkering used to lead, if not to a scientific career, at least to continued informal pursuit of science as an adult hobby. If that is not so much the case anymore – if yesterday’s youthful tinkerers no longer grind their own telescope mirrors, build radios or order weather balloons by mail from Edmund Scientific – something important may have been lost.