Should I be able to sue others for not being smart enough to stop me from doing something incredibly stupid?

In other words, why should everyone else have a legal responsibility to be smarter than me? Here’s what got me thinking about this.

Recently a high school boy here near Boston hooked himself up to 120 VAC electrodes in electrical class and shocked himself to make a cute cell phone video. The experience has left him with potentially permanent brain damage. Now his parents are suing the school, saying the teacher and school authorities should have made the danger of such behavior clearer. Maybe, but doesn’t a high school kid have some responsibility to exercise common sense? Is it right to hold everyone else responsible for my own stupid behavior. Why should they be any smarter than me?

This may not be the best example. There is a level of responsibility for supervision expected of teachers. It is reasonable to expect a teacher to be smarter than the students they are teaching, and exercise due diligence in ensuring that any dangers within a classroom are well understood and not easily misused while they are not watching.

But it got me thinking about society’s drift from personal responsibility to litigation, pushing the responsibility for everything one does from self to all others. Is it possible to turn back the clock on diffused responsibility to a setting where each of us understood that the primary person responsible for personal safety and well being is that person themselves? How might we go about doing that? How do we ensure we don’t dial back too far? If too many parents are failing to teach personal responsibility and its importance, should schools pick up the slack?