The teachers' response? "Amused, and occasionally impressed," says McKie.
He is, of course, contrasting the tolerance of youthful inquisitiveness and playfulness in the old days with the regime of health and safety measures introduced over the past decade.
It is nowadays taboo for young people to have access to anything more risky than litmus paper, McKie reckons. He then reports a story by a colleague about a geology field trip. Students used to hike into the wilderness, armed only with a tent and a hammer for breaking up samples. Then it was decreed they must wear hard hats. "So we set off with some building-site helmets in our minibus," says geologist Ted Nield, a lecturer at University College Swansea. "Then the bus went round a bend, and the helmets fell off their rack and gashed three students' heads. We hadn't had an injury until then."
One for the urban myths section?
The view from the midst of the election campaign is that there are still far too many yobs about. It would be a brave person who argued that Young People Now's Positive Images campaign has penetrated the recesses of party election strategies. Conservative Party leader Michael Howard has been particularly strong on wanting yobs "to be afraid".
Guido Fawkes, the anonymous parliamentary insider who writes a weblog on all things political, reported last week on a less well-publicised Conservative policy. At a forum on crime, Howard apparently advocated the possible imprisonment of the parents of badly behaved kids, "but only on weekends, if they repeatedly failed to control their offspring".
Blogger Fawkes thought of some practical problems that needed addressing: "Who will control the kids on the weekends the parents are locked up for not controlling their kids?"
Lock them up together, perhaps.
