If a rose is a rose by any other name - isn't Helium too?

This afternoon my boys (ages 4 and 6) embarked on a lofty science experiment... They decided they wanted to blow up balloons to release in the air so they could watch them "magically float away to join the fairies" like they have released the helium-filled balloons we get at certain restaurants.

When they first told me of their plans, I had to immediately squelch the urge to tell them that balloons filled with the air of mere humans does not possess such magical powers. Or rather, I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "They won't do that when you blow them up."

It has always been my base instinct to constantly correct and squash creativity....I am, after all, the glowing example product of public schooling. But I am working on overcoming my limitations - the ones put in place for me by years of constant correcting, pre-determined curriculums, drill and kill learning, etc - for the sake of my children.

So today I bit my tongue and let the boys take on this lofty and unattainable goal of producing a blown-up balloon that would float away into the fairy-filled skies. And they tackled the job like pros, blowing up balloon after balloon that failed to float away.

After the first balloon failed to float away, they hypothesized that perhaps they ought to have blown the balloon up in the outside air instead of the inside air and tried that... When that failed, they hypothesized that it was the color of the balloon that determined whether or not it floated away - at least until the 4yr-old pointed out that the balloons they've let float away from restaurants were all different kinds of colors... So then they decided that perhaps they needed to release their balloons in the sun instead of the shade...but that didn't work either.

Round and round they went, formulating hypothesis after hypothesis, failing time after time - yet never once did their enthusiasm or determination falter a bit. Meanwhile, I sat on the porch and continued to bite my tongue, which required less and less effort as I marveled in the scientific process my pre-school aged children were developing on their own! (If that isn't a testament to the power of children's ability to naturally explore their knowledge and build on it without the direction of a "teacher" or the confines of a "classroom", I don't know what is.)

In the end, after multiple attempts and adjustments to their experimental controls - the boys concluded there was "special air" in the balloons from the restaurant that their mouths simply couldn't produce.

And this is where most people would have stepped in to offer the answer (assuming they had even made it this far) - that helium is required to make a balloon float away into the clouds.

But I did not.

Instead, I realized something... One does not need to know that a rose is a called a rose to appreciate it's fragrance, understand the multitude of colors it comes in, be aware of the care and feeding of its plants to be grown successfully - all of these can be done even if you call it a pig. A rose is a rose by any other name, after all.

And so is helium. Sure, kids in traditional school settings might learn the proper name of helium - but what working knowledge do they have that my boys do not?

I suppose one could argue that if my boys don't know the name of helium and ever found themselves in the position of needing it (to make something else float, for example), they wouldn't know what to ask for...

But then I will just argue that my boys, having been raised without the rigid confines and constraints of learning inside the box of a classroom, would have their ingenuity and creativity intact enough to simply walk into Walmart with whatever it was that they needed to float and ask the clerk for some of that "special air" they filled balloons with.