This one showed up in several places yesterday and I finally have a little time to comment:
Kid’s Science Kits May Be No More Thanks To CPSC
September 29, 2010
by Jennifer C. Kerr, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the tools that teachers use to get kids jazzed about science — hands-on science kits — could face an uncertain future amid a debate on safety.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been mired for weeks in deliberation as it writes guidelines on what makes a product a “children’s product.” That guidance, expected Wednesday, is supposed to help sort out which products have to be tested under legislation passed by Congress over two years ago that requires rigorous safety checks for lead, chemicals, flammability and other potential dangers.
Being a dinosaur and all that, growing up in southwest Louisiana, I was subjected to all the horrors mentioned above, as were many of my contemporaries. Somehow I managed to survive all that and reach sixty in pretty good shape.
The nanny state, however, no longer wants the risk of losing kids to the dangers we survived.
Plenty of companies, from makers of handmade toys and Halloween costumes to firms selling science kits, have flooded the CPSC with requests for exemptions on some of their products.
For the makers of science kits, it is an issue that they say could lead to fewer hands-on science experiments for younger children.
Forget that they pretty much gutted the chemistry sets we played with, or that little Susie can’t ride her bicycle without a helmet any more. Our government, in the interests of “safety” and “it’s for the CHILDREN” is bent on taking away the already crippled “science kits” still available on the market.
The industry has asked the commission for a testing exemption for “general use” items such as rulers, rubber bands and paper clips inside the kits. They say the products aren’t harmful to children, would be too expensive to test, and shouldn’t have to be tested because they are everyday items found in homes and schools that don’t have to be tested if bought separately at retail.
But we have bureaucrats and nanny-staters who can tell you the difference between a rubber band bought at an office supply store and the rubber band that’s part of an elementary school science kit, and these bureaucrats KNOW that the latter has a much higher potential for lethality. After all, they have federal jobs and writing rules and regulations is how they will fix the world.
A requirement to test, the kit makers say, would force them to refocus and market kits to older children instead of the 12-and-under crowd the law targets, leaving elementary school kids without those hands-on tools.
“If the first introduction a student has is seventh or eighth grade, you’ve lost them already,” said Steve Alexander, business manager for the Hands On Science Partnership, based in Denver. The costs associated with “the testing requirements would far exceed the value of the materials in the kits,” he said.
The partnership is a coalition of companies that sell hands-on science educational materials.
“Lost them already.” But they’ll well-versed in singing paeans to Obama and the supremacy of diversity over common sense. And lined right up for the slots as a good, compliant peasantry for the New World Order, ignorant of physics and chemistry and a dozen other sciences, ready to take the word of the ruling class in every function of life.
Consumer advocates say they are sympathetic to the costs associated with the safety testing, but insist the tests must be done.
“The reason for this law is to ensure that products for children are safe,” said Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety and senior counsel at the Consumer Federation of America. “The universe for where there is ambiguity on testing is a relatively small one.”
And from such thoughts are regulations written. Tomes of regulations. And two science geeks are out of business, because where they COULD put together a packet of a few off-the-shelf odds and ends and sell that as a neat little science experiment for fourth graders, NOW every one of the components in the bag will have to (under proposed regulations) have to be specifically tested and certified as “child-safe”. So our two geeks interested in giving kids a happy little push into the sciences are out of business. The kids will have a change to learn another Obama song instead, I guess.
Or maybe take a field trip to the local mosque…
…
The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, known as CPSIA, defines a children’s product as an item designed or intended primarily for children 12 years of age or younger.
The Federal government. Our congress. Their only tool is law, rule and regulation, and this is how it shakes out.
Since passage, critics have decried confusion in the marketplace about what products have to be tested, and how often.
The most frequent complaint concerns the law’s unintended consequences — such as questions about whether library books for children need to be tested for lead.
CPSC has since issued what amounts to an exemption for most ordinary children’s books printed after 1985. For books printed before then, there’s a concern about the level of lead in the ink used, but the agency does not require libraries to test and certify those books.
It’s another one of those “feel-good” bills that congress passed, handing bureaucrats the hammer to build rules around, and when it hit the streets, it immediately started causing problems.
And now the problem goes hand in hand with other things pushing for the dumbing down of education.
I worry. It’s bad enough that video games and other technologies keep kids from real experiences. Everybody knows the standing joke about the fat kid whose football skills on screen are great, but he can’t roll off the sofa and walk outside with a real ball and real players.
We all know about the dumbing of teachers. Hell, we don’t even have “teachers” any more, we have “professional educators” who hold all manner of certifications in “education” but language teachers can’t write a coherent paragraph, math teachers can’t add and subtract, and the science teacher’s REAL job is second assistant football coach.
And we just keep making it harder and harder for a kid to go into the hopper at one end and come out at the other end with skills to do much more than sell nail polish at Walgreen’s or stock the shelves at Wal-Mart.
But the kids’ll be “safe”.
