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Posted on 07/21/2026 3:16:50 AM PDT by Adder
You remember recess, right? Monkey bars, blistering hot metal slides, tetherball, sitting around on a bench chatting with your pals. It was great.
And for most of you Gen Xers, baby boomers, and older millennials, it was the best part of school… right up there with “pizza Fridays.” The bell would ring, and the doors couldn’t fly open fast enough… kids would pour onto the playground like they were just released from prison.
Recess was a total hodgepodge created by the kids. Sure, there was usually some half-interested teacher keeping an eye on things, but the kids picked teams, made up games, argued over rules, settled little disputes, scraped their knees, and figured out how to get along without an adult hovering over their every move.
That half hour might’ve looked like chaos, but something really important was happening. Children were learning how to read a room, deal with conflict, make friends, lose gracefully, speak up for themselves, and recover when things didn’t go their way.
(Excerpt) Read more at revolver.news ...
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
The army and marines are really troubled with modern recruits not understanding their bodies and not knowing their capabilities and how to use them.
Kids now have childhoods resembling working in an office with the entire learning about and stretching and pushing the body at all stages of age development and maturity and pre/post puberty, and in competition against other males and trees, the ground, and the physical world, and pain and injuries in all those stages, the entire life experience is missing, yet here they are at basic and you can only do so much with them, and they are also missing all the emotional and mental growth that comes from those countless struggles, with their bodies, pain, and victories.
We called it 'Touchdown' because the object was to score a touchdown after you got the ball.
LOL, I'm pretty sure I know that guy. The "Board of Education" was not a committee of decision-making adults.
Don’t forget “Smear the Queer”
Not like my parents had a choice to not send us kids to the public schoo-wer (sewer); they wrent poor as dirt but weren’t wealthy and not a church had a school. It’d been better they’d rented a house in another town so we’d been able to avoid the destructive aspects of desegregation. A school system where 98% of kids were not Black.
And the time I spent on the playground at recess in grade school wasn’t spent sorting out the mayhem thrust upon me in class. Where I was assaulted physically, screamed at, my supplies stolen, etc.
Yep I came home with my clothes dirty and all sometimes but I beat the tar out of “Finnigan” and grew a very thick skin so I’d be able to stand my ground later in life. And I do.
Yeah, we didn't have any real object, other than to run around and tackle each other. There was no scoring. If you caught the ball, you were getting tackled/dog-piled by everyone else. I'm not sure why we all WANTED to catch the ball, and actually fought hard to catch it, since it meant you were definitely going to be violently tackled, but we did.
Being beaten by the older boys, beating the younger boys. 
It’s the institutional protection of the behavior of a certain group that makes it unsafe for the kids who know how to be civil, even while playing.
In the 50s we had swings, seesaws, a small slide and a tall slide, a six-seater merry-go-round, basketball hoop and court markings on the blacktop, a hopscotch area, an “outdoor amphitheater” built into the hillside, a small softball diamond, and once a year in the spring, a May pole—in our relatively small elementary school built shortly after WW2, not far from the Nation’s Capital. Plenty of the elementary kids also went there after school and weekends to play on the equipment or have bike races—unsupervised. There was an actual hermit living in the adjacent woods. Parents instructed us not to bother him. Hence, he didn’t bother us, although a few dads hiked in there to have a civil chat with him and let him know they were watching. Hence, even the sheriff didn’t have to destroy his little shelter. It was still a free country.
There was no such thing as recess when I went to grammar school.
some kids started a game of “kill the man with the ball”
before long the whole playground had joined in
50 kids chasing one kid with the ball
if he didnt get rid of it fast enough
there was a massive dogpile
great fun
it was banned before any broken bones
Really?
Yall just stayed inside or did yall go home for lunch?
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