‘Experts’ Now Calling This Favorite Schoolyard Game A ‘Tool Of Oppression’

Clash Daily ^ | 6/4/19 | Wes Walker

[Impala64ssa]

The schoolyard version of ‘Survivor’ may go the way of the lawn dart, if ‘authorities’ get their way. And so, the endless march of the sissifying of children continues unabated…

Pinggggggg!

If you are of a certain age — and went to public school — you know exactly the kind of a red rubber ball that made that distinctive sound. It was the one that you hoped desperately would NOT make that noise while bouncing off your face.

Dodgeball. It was the kind of game that taught us about the cold hard truth of merit.

And now a team of researchers are lecturing teachers that Dodgeball runs afoul of all five ‘faces’ of oppression.

The researchers add that dodgeball “reinforces the five faces of oppression” as defined by the late University of Chicago theorist Iris Marion Young. Those are marginalization, powerlessness, helplessness of those perceived as weaker, exploitation and cultural domination, according to the abstract. Source: DailyCaller

Well, it’s not SUPPOSED to be a joke. But we’ll mock them anyway.

What’s the problem with it? It’s ‘out of step’ with the Candyass Curriculum they’re trying to push.

A team of Canadian researchers are set to lecture teachers about the moral dangers of dodgeball, a sport they say teaches kids to single out and violently dominate weaker students.

Dodgeball is a tool of “oppression” and “miseducative,” the researchers say in the abstract of a paper cited by the National Post, which they will present in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a summit for thousands of academics happening in early June. The “hidden curriculum” it teaches students is out of step with the larger curriculum, they argue.

“As we consider the potential of physical education to empower students by engaging them in critical and democratic practices, we conclude that the hidden curriculum is antithetical to this project, even when it reflects the choices of the strongest and most agile students,” the abstract reads.

No, this will eventually be rolled in with all the other soul-crushing joy-devouring, ‘great ideas’ foisted upon us by the ‘experts’ from on high.

Forget the fact that INCREASING schoolyard activity has shown a near-miraculous change in student behavior, including a measurable drop in ADHD symptoms.

Forget the fact that the role of roughhousing and play is well-established in its role in helping young (whether human or animal) to gain the life skills needed in adulthood.

This was written about animals, but has obvious applications to this topic:

Movement and body play: Jump, run, stretch the body or even vocalize (e.g. by singing or growling) are all of them activities more beneficious than you think. The body play allows organisms to test the limits of their own body and of their surrounding environment (How far I am able to jump? Which effect has the gravity on my own body? Am I flexible enough to stretch my body and reach the next branch?).

Movement and corporal play produce a feeling of joy on organisms. In addition, they help organisms to earn self-confidence and they seems to have an important effect on brain organization. Source: AllYouNeedIsBiology

As far as human Play and Developmental Stages go:

[Age 9-14] …Play in the preteen years often is a group production, and the pastimes kids prefer reflect that. Many complex head games for several players, and equipment for organized sports or activities (baseball bat and glove, racket/paddle games) is often a hit. Electronic games are also popular, played either on en masse or by competitive turns. Source: Child Development Info Have the people in this study bothered to ask the kids what THEY thought about it? Some of us absolutely LOVED it for the OPPOSITE of the reasons the study gives.

Dodgeball is a sport where you don’t need an arm like a cannon, or eye-hand coordination to hit a fly ball, or massive strength, or crazy footspeed. It was a chance for a little guy to test his ability to stay one step ahead of whoever was chucking the ball. A quick duck and weave. A well-timed stutter-step. Twisting and pivoting to stay out of the way.

It was an opportunity for the skinny little kid [like yours truly] to have his day in the sun, athletically.

And killjoy authoritarians stripping away this part of childhood with so many others is a sign of what’s gone wrong with the ‘expert’ class of today.

[Shadow44]

We would play it at recess, although it was usually exclusively boys who did it.

By the time my cousins were in elementary school in the 1990s they banned it at recess. If you got caught playing it you would be given detention.

[Old Yeller]

When I grew up, we had bb gun fights.

[AFreeBird]

Dodgeball was for sissies.

Smear the queer was rough and tumble.

[Calvin Locke]

I think tetherball went out with Napoleon Dynamite.

[bigbob]

We had a variant called Warball that put 10 balls in play. You WERE going to get whacked. You tried really hard not to get double or triple-whacked. That hurt.

[Finnwolf]

We called that Bombardment back in the 60’s and early 70’s generally playing it on Fridays. I figured it was a primitive wargame getting us boys ready for military service!

It did beat running laps though....

[PhillyPhreeper]

No dodge ball when I grew up. We played buck buck.

[rlmorel]

We had a game like Dodgeball, but it was not played within the confines of a court, but involved tearing around all over the place and trying to hit people with the ball, who then had to take the ball if hit and hit someone else.

We called it by the un-PC name of "Smear the Queer with the Ball". Of course, back then, a queer wasn't a homosexual to us, but was an odd person who didn't fit. Now I suppose you would get tagged with hate speech for even naming the game. And the object, as you chased someone down, was not just to hit them with the ball, but to nail them as hard as you could!

Funny. You think of the games...Red Rover was a favorite, and you could get twenty kids to play without having to have parents sitting there watching or driving the kids somewhere to play it. The way we played it, it was a pretty rough game, and kids occasionally got hurt playing it...heh, running at full speed and plowing into the arms and hands of other kids determined not to let you get through. I suppose it is amazing any of us came through those games unscathed.

Another favorite was...Sardines! It was like Hide and Seek in reverse. One kid would hide, and the other kids had to find the kid. When you found them, you had to hide with them, the crowd getting bigger and bigger. I remember it was hilarious, you would have ten kids piled in behind some old guys shrubbery, all giggling, pressing against each other shushing noisy kids trying to stay hidden...:)

It seemed like a game that was always played right after the sun went down, around the time the fireflies began coming out.

Lastly, two of my most favorite games were played during the last two years I had in the Boy Scouts when I was 13-14.

When we were camping, we always played Capture the Flag, and I nearly killed myself when we played it one night and I made it up to the hill and got the flag. IIRC, you had to make it back to your flag to consider it "captured", so when when I grabbed the flag and began running at top speed down the hill in the pitch black darkness with a bunch of "enemy" guys chasing me, converging on me and calling in the darkness to their teammates trying to head me off, I ran smack into the stump of a tree that was sticking a few feet out of the ground. I really did think I had seriously injured myself.

But my favorite game of all was played every week when we had our weekly meeting in our lodge. On the small Naval communications base where we lived near Andrews AFB, they had a small building that was all our own, single story, one room, the size of a very small ranch house. No windows.

We had a game called "Midnight Football". We played it during the last hour before we closed up the meeting for the night. The Scoutmaster, a first class petty officer, would sit next to the light switch smoking his cigarette. We cleared all the tables and chairs to the sides and split into two chosen teams and lined up on each side of the lodge (probably 20 feet across?) on our hands and knees. facing the team on the other side.

The football was placed in the middle of the floor between the two sides. The game was played ONLY on hands and knees. Your knees could not come off the floor. Supposedly.

When the lights were turned out, everyone scrambled to the center to grab the football and take it and touch the wall on the opposing side to score a touchdown. It was absolutely brutal with heads conking, people getting poked in the eyes, hands being stepped and kneeled on, legs getting twisted and noses getting flattened and bloodied, and large pig piles of energetic and competitive boys would collect in the dark.

Then, unexpectedly after a brief interval, the Scoutmaster would turn on the overhead light, and everyone had to freeze in place. If you moved after the light came on, you were "out" and had to go to the sideline. None of the physical mayhem was intentional, but you can imagine that initial scramble would cause stars to be seen by at least nearly someone every time, no matter how cautious you were.

For a bunch of boys, you couldn't imagine a game that was more fun, physical, and yes...painful. I loved it because I was a fairly muscular kid, even though I was clumsy and uncoordinated, so it played right to my strength. If I could get my hands on the ball, the opposition would pile on me, but I would doggedly drag them through the dark towards the opposite wall, and when the lights came on, I might have three or four other scouts latched onto me.

There was strategy...you could hand the ball off to a teammate while the opposing side tried frantically in the dark to pry it from your grasp. You could pretend to have the ball, attracting people blindly in the dark to you while someone else crawled in a different direction. And when the lights were turned out, it was fair game to stand up with the ball and run in the dark...as long as you were back on your knees when the lights came back on unexpectedly!

It seems incomprehensible that, in today's world, they would let kids play a game like that, presided over by a grinning adult who sat smoking a cigarette! But that is how it was...all of us so looked forward to the game every week, and we had a big troop for a base that size (maybe 20 kids?)

Here is a picture of some of us at some ceremony presided over by the base Chaplain...:)

Sigh. I would never want to go back to being a kid unless I could bring my adult brain with me, but...I wouldn't trade it for anything. I look at kids now, and the process of growing up seems so...different, foreign, and somehow sterile. I suppose it always seems that way to old people...:)

[rlmorel]

Reminds me of this:

[neverevergiveup]

That's a really interesting experience (the girls being hardest to eliminate from the game). We never played coed dodgeball, because our gym classes were not coed.

One of my favorite childhood ‘games’ was to be on the gravel playground in south Chicago in the winter when it was snowing. The gravel was very slick, and traction was difficult to achieve. We would play a game in which there was a person in the middle between two ‘sides’ demarcated by some arbitrary markers (e.g. the side of the building, the post of the baseball backstop..). All of us would be on one side, and run to the other - trying not to be tagged by the person in the middle. Once tagged, you joined the person in the middle - and when everyone tried again to run to the other side you tried to tag them. In the end, there would often be one person left, with everyone else in the middle trying to tag them. One of the greatest (in my mind) athletic achievements I have achieved was to be the last person and juke everyone out (on a snow, slippery winter day) to get to the other side without being touched. I felt sooooo cool.

[Hieronymus]

You just named the game that would have beat out dodgeball with my grade school class. Of course there were only 12 of us, and 11 were boys.

That said, for some reason, we never played STQ as part of PE—strictly a recess thing that happened to work because we had a school located on about 5 acres with two teachers doing recess duty somewhere other than my class was.

I thought the game was home grown because I’ve never heard it mentioned outside of my grade school, which shut down a year and a half after I graduated.

I think I learned that Queer was a derogatory term about two years after that.

Where are you from and when were you in grade school.

[TADSLOS]

...and then they go home and play Fortnite then watch some Game of Thrones.

Dodgeball is a threat...? Pffft.

[mozarky2]

My grand-daughter goes to a charter school that stresses physical fitness and the have four or five variants of dodgeball they play. I’ve watched them play 25 to a team before and everybody, even the smallest kids, really get into it. They seem to be having a lot of fun.

[Hieronymus]

Interesting to see STQ come up in two different posts. The south-western Oregon version involved a fairly small red rubber ball maybe four inches in diameter, and resembled a cross between rugby and a suicide mission. Whomever had the ball was “The Queer,” and tried to hold onto the ball for as long as possible while other people tried to get the ball from him, often by tackling, wrestling, and dog piling (thus the smear); when the ball was torn loose, there would be a mad scramble to get the ball, with whomever captured it becoming the next Queer, trying to hold onto it for as long as possible.

It would burn off a great deal of energy in about 20 minutes, and as far as I can recall, no one ever got seriously hurt and admitted it.

[rlmorel]

"...no one ever got seriously hurt and admitted it..."

Heheh...that's kind of the key statement there, eh?

[stinkerpot65]

Democrats are evil.

[Hieronymus]

It’s also a key life lesson if you want to get anything done rather than sit around and b*tch.

Learning to play through pain is a hugely important lesson. A country boy can survive.

My Dad grew up about 70 miles north of where I was raised. Busted 7 ribs and messed up a lung close to a month ago while topping a tree, so he was forced to spend his first nights in hospital in 74 years. Also damaged a vertebrae—but the vertebrae had taken much more serious damage about 30 years ago to the tune of a (mildly, I assume) broken back. Mom’s pretty sure she can remember when it happened, because he had a tough time getting around for a couple of weeks.

Good thing he stopped smoking last year. Oh, and the more thorough testing showed that his heart needs surgery—so it is most definitely providential.

[FrdmLvr]

I thought they did away with Dodgeball decades ago! It was actually my favorite recess game and sometimes we played it in gym. So much fun!

[rlmorel]

I think it helped me being a rough an tumble kid, but I am no tough guy. When I had kidney stones, I about lost my mind even though they seemed to be pretty small.

I really respect people like your dad (and my own, now departed). Men of his generation sure were tougher than we were.

[mabarker1]

Can’t. It’s labeled a Hate crime because it’s got the Ball HANGING frem a rope and advocates a Head hanged by a noose.