Sister Golden Hair Surprise

So, I called my brother and he said he had an assignment to do a reasearch project on anything he chose. I suggested eugenics (I recently read an interesting article on it). I called back a few days later and he told me that his teacher said that he had to do something more recent and told him to do his paper on Thomas Edison. This really bothered me. First of all, Thomas Edison is not more recent. Second (and mostly), what is her problem?!? Thomas Edison? I mean, I'm glad we have light bulbs and all, but really, what kind of research paper is that going to be? was she afraid that she wouldn't be able to grade it because it was something she hadn't had 25 other research papers on before? If she's trying to get kids interested in research, or science, or both, this is not the way to go about it. If she said "anything you want", she should let them do anything they want. I did a research paper once in high school, and my teacher said we could do anything we wanted. I chose leaprosy. Because I got to choose something I was actually curious about, i worked harder, started earlier, found more sources, and wrote a way more interesting paper than if whe woudl have said "leaprosy, I don't already know about that. Why don't you wrote about Thomas Edison." We all shared our papers with the class and there were all kinds of topics...from the history of the toilet to the genocide in Rwanda. We may not have learned about what our teacher was interested in ,but her goal was to have us learn research skills and to find out that research can be fun when you care about your work. Oh well, I guess she'll just be stuck reading a bunch of boring papers...but at least she won't have to learn anything new.