14 Final Notes
With the activities and pointers described here, we’ve scarcely scratched the surface. There’s tinkering to be done in nearly every area of life, and a world of tinkering education to be had outside the official curriculum. The road lies open before us.
By this point, the more academically inclined of my readers will have grown quite frustrated by my unwillingness to offer a simple definition to what tinkering is. I’ve been beating around the philosophical bush since page one. What, after all, is the difference between tinkering and inquiry? Between tinkering and “hands-on science?” Between tinkering and the scientific method, or gathering empirical data? Can you tinker with chess or number puzzles? How systematically can you tinker before you’re no longer tinkering?
While I’d love to discuss these questions with you someday on a pleasant stroll through the hillocks of the Shire, I can’t think them too important. Tinkering for me is kids learning by making stuff, whether it be a model airplane, an electronic gizmo, a wooden chair, a leaf album, a mess of fish guts during a dissection, a rock candy crystal, a paper cup flower garden, or a discovery into the workings of their busted hair dryer. When I can facilitate kids tinkering with these things, I’m super confident that I’m helping them to approach and understand their world in positive, practical, constructive, and ultimately effective manner, as well as helping them get a firm, guiding grip on their own education. For some of them, this is nothing short of revolutionary on a personal level.
Hold fast to idealism! Yes, to become real engineers, your kids will doubtless have to trudge through countless, mind-numbing problem sets, but Michael Faraday received little formal education and rarely wrote an equation in the process of discovering the relation between light and magnets and making the first motor! He was a tinkering superstar! Sure, to make the next big bio-medical breakthrough, your students will likely have to mix hard-to-get genetic scraps with various highly purified enzymes thousands of times in a smelly laboratory with precisely the same procedure, but Anton van Leeuwenhoek was an amateur tinkerer who developed his own microscopes to become the best of the day and with them viewed for the first time single-celled organisms, muscle fibers, and capillary blood flow! The man knew how to tinker!
Think of the famous tinkerers you know and what they’ve given the world! Leonardo de Vinci, Robert Fulton, Marie Curie, Thomas Crapper (yes, you’ve guessed correctly), Frank Lloyd Wright and his distant kin Wilbur and Orville, Edison, Ford, Salk and Sabin, Cousteau, Hewlett and Packard, and Gates (tinkering made him realize he didn’t need Harvard).
Zounds. They’re all men but one, some of them quite sexist! But don’t you believe for an instant that there were not a lot of women tinkering with the same stuff as those men every chance they got. The reason you don’t know more famous women tinkerers has more to do with the miserably inferior opportunities given to women over the years than with any male predilection to tinkering. That, and the fact that men also held the power of the press, so all too often even when a woman healer or midwife made a big breakthrough, men would downplay or ignore it or even take credit for it. Certainly, today it is no problem to find women in every area of professional and amateur tinkering.
Perhaps even more significant than those famous names are the millions of tinkerers like myself who, despite thousands of hours tinkering like crazy, have added little to the sum total of human accomplishment, but who have had such a ripping good time of it we don’t give a fig and intend to keep on tinkering until we’re so old and frail we can no longer be wheeled into our workspaces!
Long live tinkering and all the wonderful things to be learned from it! Long may you tinker with your kids! Now get to it!