Are health and safety fears out of control...

…or is it all just media hype?

I’m asking this in light of this report, stating fears that school children are being denied the opportunity to experiment in science classes, over fears of burns, acid spills, and other dangers.

If it is a real worry, what can be done to counter the trend?

I don’t know, but the trend is real, not limited to just the UK, and really ticks me off.

Yes, there are dangers. But there are dangers out in the real world, too. By completely insulating children from them they never learn to deal with them. I see this with the new guy at work - he has zero experience with potential hazards and not only has no clue how to handle chemicals or tools he also has almost no capacity to evaluate a situation for danger and either over reacts or doesn’t take precautions that seem obvious to the rest of us. Watching a video does not substitute for the muscle-memory that comes from actually doing something.

Wow. Fucking stupid. I graduated high school 11 years ago, and I remember doing these experiments and similar ones. I don’t recall any injuries or accidents. I do however clearly remember breaking a finger as a result of tripping in p.e. while playing tennis. I also remember a kid losing a large piece of thumb in wood shop. And while I don’t remember anyone getting hurt in there, the metals shop was a crazy scary place. Walking / driving to school is probably more dangerous than these simple science lessons. I’m really just at a loss for words here. This is ridiculous.

Well, I would think the best people for the job would be the parents of students and perhaps even the students themselves.

I don’t exactly understand what you’re trying to say here. Is the guy lacking in common sense because he watched a safety video? Would he suddenly have gained common sense and an understanding of handling those chemicals by NOT watching the video?

Perhaps the problem with the new guy is that he’s a new guy. Maybe he’s also not very bright.

If overprotecting people was a problem in terms of making them unaware of danger in the workplace, workplace accidents would be on the rise. But in fact, they are not.

I’m talking about a guy who has a job to which climbing on ladders is an intrinsic part of the job who has never been on anything larger than a step stool before because mommy deemed it “too dangerous” - and hasn’t a clue about how to position it safely, and seems utterly clueless both about the danger about dropping crap while up the ladder and walking under a ladder in use. I’m talking about a guy who doesn’t know that hanging your face over a bottle ammonia is not a good idea. I’m talking about a guy who was terrified because some mineral spirits splashed on his skin because it was a “poison” and “acid” (?). OK, you don’t want to bathe in the stuff, but seriously, wash your damn hands off, you’ll be OK. I’m talking about a guy who we had to teach how to use a utility knife because, again, mommy said knives were “too dangerous”. Upon further questioning, growing up he was never permitted to use a saw or hammer because mommy feared he might hurt himself.

It’s not stupidity - the young man IS learning - the problem is that he was kept deliberately ignorant by his parents and yet now that he’s turned 18 mommy and daddy can’t understand why he’s struggling with a construction job. No, it’s not a matter of watching workplace videos, we’re on jobsites, we’re lucky to have toilets, much less video equipment. The problem is that he led such an insulated childhood that he really does struggle with incredibly basic safety things, things that I grew up absorbing because MY parents taught me how to use basic hand tools and handle household chemicals from an early age, first with adult supervision then on my own. He hasn’t had an accident because we, the older and more experience workers, watch him like a hawk and have taken the time to teach him. Problem is, that takes away from actually doing our work. If he wasn’t the friend of a friend of the boss he probably would have been fired by now because yes, his ignorance HAS put other people at risk.

Sounds like this guy’s in the wrong line of work to me. Back to the science thing though… who is it that we need to kill to remedy this?

Definitely, but overall unemployment in my area is officially over 10%, and in his age demographic close to 40% - there is no other work for him right now.

As usual, let’s start with the lawyers. Next would be overprotective parents.

The big issue (or at least one of them) is how this effects science education. Lets face it, when you’re a kid the bits of science that can kill you are the interesting parts. Take them away and the attraction of science as a career diminishes massively (as demonstrated by the drop in students studying science at universities in the US/UK).

Not to say there isn’t some media hype about it, for starters playing the “health and safety” card is a convenient way to cut expensive programs without taking the blame yourself (of course part of the reason such things are expensive is the amount of red-tape and insurance involved in doing anything remotely hazardous). But definitely “health and saftey” culture is out of hand both in the US and UK, it not just media hype, its a very real, and it is definitely detrimental to society.

I think every parent in the country will tell you it’s out of control, but that doesn’t mean they’ll let their child go anywhere without parental supervision. As the number of children per household declines those children will naturally be overvalued and overparented. Other countries have had lesser problems with even lower children/household though, and for that I blame the ratings-driven media constantly raising the shock/fear level and the oversupply of lawyers.

It’s not just science classes.

There was an article in today’s paper about a cemetery that’s forcing all of its customers (?) to remove everything from their dear departed’s space for fear that someone might trip on a framed picture or floral arrangement and get hurt.

From this article:

I’ll make my declarations,I’m a qualified H&S manager though not in the business now,I have been and am still a member of the Institute of Occupational Health &Safety.

There was a similar thread a while back but from an American perspective.

The fact is everyone here is confusing cause with effect.

The reason that schools are appearing so over protective is as a direct result of the litigation culture that we have adopted from the Americans.

This is exacerbated by the plethora of “No Win ,no Fee” legal companies.

Even otherwise quite responsible parents get the glitter of greed in their eyes when their little darlings hurt themselves, however trivially, when under school jurisdiction.

And their attitude is very much one of “lets try it on we might get lucky and its not going to cost us anything”.
In the past Local Authorities have caved in even though they know that the allegations of negligence and responsibility laid against them are nonsense but it is cheaper to pay an out of court settlement then all of the legal fees required to defend the case.

As a result teachers loathe being put in the position where they might be blamed for kiddywinks non accident and L.A.s try to eliminate as far as possible any scenarios that might lay them open to blackmail,sorry accusations of negligence.

Of course the kids education and self reliance suffer immeasurably and where they’re so overprotected now they genuinlly have become,excuse my French,the biggest bunch of whining fucking Wussies we’ve ever seen in history.

And remember if you pay Council Tax or income tax its YOU who ends up paying both for the payout and the increased insurance premiums as a result of these actions.
The litigation culture has made its presence known in adult working culture as well.
In H&S inductions I had to tell grown adults things that a child would know and make them sign to show that they’d been told.

I would often get protests from the new guys about being told the totally bleeding obvious and I always responded that everytime someone had got a payout for doing something bloody stupid but which we hadn’t covered in the briefing the Insurance company would insist that we included it in our briefings from then on and STILL raised our premiums.

One example where someone tried it on (But I told him to fuck off) was when a workman tripped over his trailing laces and smashed his kneecap.

We had told him that he must wear steel toe capped boots for protection but we hadn’t told him that he had to do his laces up.
Even the cowboy legal firms didn’t try running THAT one up the flagpole.

Had I to guess, this is just the excuse they’re using to discourage people from piling tons of memorabilia on their departed’s graves. I’ll wager the cemetery people have seen more than enough competitive grave-decoration from mourners who need to put on more of a show of grieving than just leaving a few flowers that it’s become a nuisance and headache. Want to show the world how much you loved your dead kid? Leave a six-foot stuffed animal on his grave! Feel concerned that your bitch sister is leaving ornate cards covered in calligraphy expressing her grief on your mother’s grave? Show HER, and set up a solar-powered projector showing family movies on an infinite loop!

Humans can get stupidly competitive over anything, and it only takes a handful of nutcases to screw it up for everyone.

QFT!
Now, I’m not saying that “overparenting” doesn’t play a role in all of this. The media gets part of the blame, too. “OMG, germs!! Must kill them!” But all too often, when stupid shit is done in the name of “safety”, it’s not safety they’re concerned with at all, it’s dumb-ass lawsuits!

Just FTR, I’m the mother of a 9YO girl (and an 18YO girl and a 22YO girl, but in the words of Arlo Guthrie ‘that’s not what I came here to talk about’). And do you know what I let her do? I let her ride a bike. She doesn’t even always wear a helmet! And she goes rollerskating with no knee or elbow pads. She bowls with a 10 pound bowling ball. Sometimes, as soon as she gets off the school bus (and she walks home from the bus stop alone, too!), she’ll throw her bookbag in the door and say “I’m going to the library; I’ll be home in time for dinner”, and I let her go.

Why in the world the authorities haven’t taken her away from me, I’ll never understand. :stuck_out_tongue:

When I took high school chemistry (in the U.K., in the 1960s) we did lab work all the time. Some of the more dangerous experiments, like metallic sodium in water, or stuff involving concentrated acids, were done as demos by the teacher, but even us kids got to handle quite poisonous things, such as lead salts (and concentrated acids too, by the 6th form). Chemistry was my favorite subject. I, and severalof my friends, had chemical apparatus and chemicals at home that we played about with just for fun.

Last year my daughter took honors chemistry in a California highschool. She did not get to do any experiments, and saw only a handful of demonstrations. The class was almost entirely mathematically oriented theory about electron orbitals and certain other aspects of physical chemistry. She is a smart, motivated, hard-working kid, and seemed to respect her teacher, but she hated the class. I was assured by all concerned that this was a good teacher, who was merely doing what was mandated by the curriculum.

Despite the fact that I have a B.Sc. in biochemistry (admittedly knowledge not used for several decades) I was not able to help her very much with her homework, but, in the process of trying to, I found that she had gained only the haziest idea of basic concepts like reaction or chemical bond (let alone having any idea about how any of the substances involved might look or smell), although her ability to do calculations concerning electron shells and quantum numbers and reaction dynamics was way beyond anything I could now (and quite possibly more than I was ever able to do, even while I was taking and passing chemistry classes at university). It seemed that she had learned some of the theoretical superstructure of chemistry by rote, but without the proper conceptual foundations, and almost entirely without any foundation in experience of actual chemicals and chemical processes.

She has now dropped chemistry. I am disappointed, but I do not blame her. I would be amazed if anyone wanted to study chemistry further after going through a class like that. Chemistry education (in particular) is in serious trouble if this is at all typical. We will lose a whole generation.