Don Herbert, known to young people from several generations as “Mr. Wizard,” passed away yesterday. Like many others I watched “Mr. Wizard’s World” while growing up, and loved to see the fun, wacky experiments he would take up with his young apprentices.
When I read the NY Times obituary for Herbert, it dawned on me (since I hadn’t thought of him for years) that Mr. Wizard was a great model for how adults can interact with kids with respect and dignity. Mr. Wizard treated the young people on the show as fellow scientists with ideas and opinions that mattered just as much as his own. Rather than lecturing and showing the kids experiments, Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert, of course) involved them in the experiments’ creation and implementation.
As Physicist Frank Wilczek from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton noted in a 1990 interview, “What was really remarkable about Mr. Wizard was that he talked to the kids as if they were real people.” Had Mr. Herbert acted with the more typical directive and authoritarian style that many adults use to talk to and treat young people, I highly doubt that so many scientists and others today would mention Mr. Wizard as an important influence (as did about half of applicants to Rockefeller University in the 1960s and ’70s, according to the article).
Thank you, Don Herbert, for inspiring so many people and for showcasing to the world that young people can and ought to be treated with respect.