The response to the arrest and suspension of a ninth-grader after he brought a homemade clock to school has been a timely, heartwarming reminder that we are a nation of makers.
Ahmed Mohamed's incident has catalyzed a national discussion about bias, race and education. What happened to him should also get us talking about the state of our freedom to build, create, and make.
Mohamed, of Irving, Texas, had hoped to show off his device to teachers Monday, but it was mistaken for a bomb. The 14-year-old student, a Muslim of Sudanese descent, was taken to a juvenile detention center. He has since been released and isn't going to be charged by the Irving police department, but, at the time of writing, he remains suspended from school.
As Americans, we are endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Whether we find happiness writing software code in a dorm room, rebuilding a car engine in a garage or working at a lab bench, every American kid needs the "freedom to tinker," no matter what their gender, color or creed.
Inventing, tinkering and hacking have been part of America since its inception. One of our founding fathers, Ben Franklin, was a tinkerer, earning an international reputation for his inventions and contributions to science. Experimentation, education, imagination and perspiration have been central to the innovation that led to the technological marvels surrounding us today.
That kind of restless curiosity leads to the creativity and engineering excellence that has enabled Americans to go to the moon, create the Internet and apply breakthroughs in basic science to invent the smartphone. Unfortunately, as The Verge highlighted, high school students in the United States are lagging in math and science among countries studied by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
When the World Economic Forum ranks your country 49th on health and primary education, the charging of a high school student with a felony for a lab accident and the arresting of young inventors is exactly the opposite of the way forward.
While we might understand the caution the Irving School District displayed in its handling of Ahmed Mohamed, both the teachers and the police could have reacted better to the young man coming forward with the device.
Ignorance, technophobia, racism and Islamophobia only hold back the people whose talents are needed now and in the future. In this young century, we need everyone to understand how important being able to build and maintain technology is to our collective future. In particular, we need legislators, educators and the justice system to adjust, given the power and discretion they have to derail the lives of our young people.
If Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had been arrested for phone phreaking or pranks as young men, we wouldn't have Apple today.
They're far from alone in the tech industry, which is full of people who took things apart to understand how they worked, eventually learning how to put them together to make something new. The reason that makers and hackers care so much about the freedom to tinker is that doing so has frequently been fundamental to their intellectual and professional development.
We don't just need more Ahmed Mohameds in the United States of America. We need to keep inspiring more men and women like him to come here from other countries.
We need them to learn in our universities, found companies and join laboratories, and then teach others, just as generations of other immigrants have come to pursue the American dream and give their own children more opportunities.
We need to encourage our daughters and sons of immigrants to "think different" in our young century, providing them with the space and support to make mistakes.
Many of the inventors who have created the tools and technologies of today and tomorrow understand intuitively the need to support young scientists and technologies. Here's hoping that every young person who sees what has happened this week is encouraged to pursue their dreams, not abandon them.