oh good grief...

[acroyear]

Students Aren't Allowed To Touch Real Rocks - Forbes.com:

Michael Warring, president of American Educational Products in Fort Collins, Colo., had his shipment all ready: A school's worth of small bags, each one filled with an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock. Then the school canceled its order. Says Warring, "They apparently decided rocks could be harmful to children."

After all, who knows exactly what is in a piece of Mother Nature? There could be a speck of lead!

The children will study a poster of rocks instead.

And so it goes in the unbrave new world, where nothing is safe enough. It's a world brought to us by the once sane, now danger-hallucinating Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Comments

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

Is there not somewhere, somehow a sensible middle ground between "kids can't have contact with real rocks" and "let's sell randomly exploding firecrackers to toddlers!"?
And when am I going to be arrested for letting Robbie wade, shod in sandals, in a moving creek with a net in nature class? I'm fairly sure he touched a number of rocks, unfiltered water, and some unsanitized fish to boot.

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Blaming the CPSC for safety paranoia is like blaming Jonas Salk for polio.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

If one of the kids gets a paper cut from the poster, I will laugh.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

nice.

[dawntreader]

this makes me so sad. especially as that's my hometown

here's a NEWSFLASH for the schoolboard. THE MOUTAINS ARE FULL OF FECKING ROCKS. so are the WHOLE OUTDOORS. what a bunch of neanderthals.

my best best best unit ever in geology was 25 "rock stations" (heh, yes, really) where you decided what kind of rock it was based on the properties of the rock. you got to scratch it with a nail, your fingernail, a penny, dip it in water, do other stuff to it to determine what kind of rock it was. 25 rocks. i got them all right.

i probably couldn't do that NOW, but it was awesome.

wtf kind of lesson can you get from a god-damned POSTER?

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

here's a NEWSFLASH for the schoolboard. THE MOUTAINS ARE FULL OF FECKING ROCKS. so are the WHOLE OUTDOORS.

which is why many school systems have already gotten rid of recess.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

Wanna bet that the school in question will want to look at the different types of rocks as they exist and not pay any attention to WHY they are different?

[uncle-possum.livejournal.com]

Sigh--here we go again: Lo these many years ago, when OSHA was first started, farmers in places like Nebraska were fined for not have portpotties in their fields (workers might get infections from the poo, or smell the pee), and cattle and pig farmers were actually fined because they had whole pens with fresh animal poo (workers might slip in the stuff and get hurt). while at the same time, fruit pickers in California were being spayed with DDT while they worked.

When the lead thing first came out, there was a provision which would have closed down most children's departments in libraries (all that lead in the older books' ink). At least that got changed. So there is some hope.

Although based on some other news items about schools, I am not convinced it was CPSC but the local school's suits that are responsible.