Why safer isn’t always better

Listening to CBC Radio’s “Sounds Like Canada” show last week (podcast here; let me know if the link doesn’t work), I heard summer host Kevin Sylvester interview Matt Hern about the new U.S. edition of his book, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn’t Always Better, out last month in paperback; it was published in Canada last summer, but both Amazon.ca and Chapters list it with 4-6 week and 3-5 week availability, never a good sign, I’ve found.

The radio conversation, which was continued on today’s “Sounds Like Canada” show, and subject of the book, are right in line with my own thoughts about childhood fun, danger, acceptable risk, responsibility, and independence. From the publisher’s website:

From warnings on coffee cups to colour–coded terrorist gauges to ubiquitous security cameras, our culture is obsessed with safety.

Some of this is drive by lawyers and insurance, and some by over–zealous public officials, but much is indicative of a cultural conversation that has lost its bearings. The result is not just a neurotically restrictive society, but one which actively undermines individual and community self–reliance. More importantly, we are creating a world of officious administration, management by statistics, absurd regulations, rampaging lawsuits, and hygenically cleansed public spaces. We are trying to render the human and natural worlds predictable and calculated. In doing so, we are trampling common discourse about politics and ethics.

Hern asserts that safer just isn’t always better. Throughout Watch Yourself, he emphasizes the need to rethink our approach to risk, reconsider our fixation with safety, and reassert individual decision–making.

Much more conversation on the radio than the website about the effect of all this caution on our children.

Looking up the book and author online, I was interested to learn that six years ago Matt Hern founded the Purple Thistle Centre for Youth Arts & Activism, a “deschool” in Vancouver, BC with “alternative ways of taking in information or learning skills”. Hern has written more about his thoughts of learning and deschooling in two books, the out-of-print Deschooling Our Lives (shades of Ivan Illich) and Field Day: Getting Society Out of School.

On a more lighthearted note on the subject of danger, I ran across this post, The Borderline Sociopathic Book for Boys, at the new-to-me and very enjoyable blog Sippican Cottage. The post has inspired Sippican’s new blog, The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys, guided by the words of Mark Twain, “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” And, just in time for back-to-school season, don’t miss Sippican’s post last week on schools and education.