Gever Tulley, co-author of Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do) thinks we should let kids play with fire, climb trees, tinker with tools, etc., in order to develop competence:
We recognize competent people by their behavior when presented with a problem; they tend to assess and then act, formulating a plan and adapting it to the situation as it unfolds. They have a kind of confidence that comes from knowing that things can be figured out, whether they are broken appliances, local water shortages in a remote location, or difficult social situations.
This kind of competence only comes from practice. Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work though difficult problems. Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns.
He plans on taking his Tinkering School camps to the next level, by opening a K-12 school in San Francisco called Brightworks:
The entire curriculum is based on something called the Brightworks arc. Each phase of this arc is about two weeks long, so there are no classroom periods, no tests, but it’s a very rigorous pedagogy nonetheless. We focus on depth, not breadth. But in a K-12 program, you experience 60 to 80 of these arcs, so we pick up the breadth over time.
The arc starts out with a phase of exploration, which is a curated experience where we bring in passionate experts related to a specific topic. For example, wind: We bring in people who have devoted their lives to working with wind—meteorologists, artists, wind-power generation people. Then we proceed through other phases — expression and exposition — in which the kids decide on an audacious end product, embark on the process of doing it, and share it with the school. The process is to get them used to the idea that when you have a great idea, you take your best guess about what and how long you need to do it, and you undertake it. In doing so, you learn how to get better at it.