Gever Tulley Quotes

#1. Kids who grow up in radically different environments are always going to have different comfort levels with regard to a topic. If you don't live near a train track, it's hard to squash a penny that way, and if you live in an apartment in New York City, it may be difficult to get to drive a car.

Gever Tulley

#2. The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid.

Gever Tulley

#3. The more opportunities we have, the more likely we are to be able to handle the unexpected.

Gever Tulley

#4. Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns.

Gever Tulley

#5. When we strive to remove all risk from childhood we also remove the foundations of a rational adulthood, and we eliminate the very experiences that will help kids grow up to be the empowered, creative, brave problem-solvers that they can and must be.

Gever Tulley

#6. The evolution of playground equipment has been to this ever safer, less challenging, less interesting assemblies of equipment.

Gever Tulley

#7. When we protect children from every possible source of danger, we also prevent them from having the kinds of experiences that develop their sense of self-reliance, their ability to assess and mitigate risk, and their sense of accomplishment.

Gever Tulley

#8. Every day, new laws are created that further hamper the ways children can engage with the world.

Gever Tulley

#9. The idea that we can make all things safe for all behaviors is in itself a dangerous and slippery slope.

Gever Tulley

#10. Being able to jump off a swing is actually a useful and meaningful thing for a child to do ... those are the tests that help us understand the limits of our body. That's a positive learning experience that we deny children on a regular basis.

Gever Tulley

#11. Pocketknives are kind of drifting out of our cultural consciousness, which I think is a terrible thing.

Gever Tulley

#12. The potential for engaged learning is inversely proportionate to the knowability of the outcome.

Gever Tulley

#13. Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work though difficult problems.

Gever Tulley

#14. Avoiding guilt is not the same as making rational decisions.

Gever Tulley

#15. Every child, and every person, deserves a chance to make something of themselves.

Gever Tulley

#16. I'm a contract computer scientist by trade, but I'm the founder of something called the Tinkering School. It's a summer program which aims to help kids to learn how to build the things that they think of.

Gever Tulley