You can't possibly provide students with hands-on experience. Hands-on experience in anything may lead to:

* Possible risk of injury (sue-happy paranoid America)
* Possible smuggling of drug manufacturing materials (again, sue-happy paranoid America)
* Only ter'rists would want to build a rocket
* Only ter-rists work with chemistry kits
* The noise from a rocket might "offend" someone somewhere (sue-happy pussified America)
* The rocket is a dual-purpose vehicle. Sure, it may have academic and even fun value, but it might also be used to deliver a .00000000000000001 kiloton incindiary device. We can't risk that. Won't someone think of the children?
* It is important to teach children that it is better to be safe than to have an interesting life with some element of risk involved.

Let's reference a chain email that I'm sure everyone has seen by now (and I never checked Snopes to see if it is really originated from Jay Leno), but it is well worth repeating anyhow:

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
1930s, '40s, '50s, '60s and '70s!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.

As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags, bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

Riding in the back of a pick-up truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon..
We drank Kool-Aid made with real white sugar.
And, we weren't overweight.
WHY?

Because we were
Always outside playing...that's why!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were O.K.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride them down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's and X-boxes.
There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable,
No video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's,
No cell phones, No personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms.
WE HAD FRIENDS
And we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!

These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

If YOU are one of them?
CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers