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November 17, 2011 Paternalism

And then they came for the … soccer balls! I cannot make up the headline:

We want our balls back!

Our kids schoolyard has neither swings nor see-saws. My response? I pile up leaves real high and let me kids launch off of the roof of my car into the piles. What will they do next, ban leaf piles?

Here is the last episode in the series. (HT to a loyal reader MH).

"3" Comments
  1. My brother and I were blessed by our attendance at a one-room school for our first two years of elementary school. We not only did not have soccer balls or playground equipment, but we also had outdoor bathrooms, a coal stove that was stoked by our teacher, and separate cloak rooms for cloaks, jackets, coats, hats and gloves.

    Recess occurred after each class spent ten minutes of eyeball-to-eyeball with our teacher, who had a “normal school” degree and no advanced degree in education. After ten minutes with Dick, Jane and Spot, we played softball (in the spring) or a game of tag that involved throwing a rubber ball (provided by one of the students, not the school system) over the roof of the schoolhouse, whereupon one of the kids on the other side would catch it and run around to the other side of the schoolhouse to tag someone there with the rubber ball. After about 15 minutes of this tag game, everyone was thirsty enough to drink hand-pumped water out of a common dipper. Some of the kids had water cups of their own. Another recess activity: skinning the cat on a branch of a pear tree. That did not involve cats.

    After those two years, all of the one-room school kids were bused to the consolidated elementary school. We Reed School alumni/ae were about four or five grade levels smarter than our consolidated Red Hill School counterparts, largely because those Red Hill schoolers had been subjected to sight reading and other revolutionary theories of progressive education.

    Environmentalism and its political usefulness was not part of the curriculum then.

  2. I figured Rod would beat me to the punch with this one, and I will not embellish the story until next month.

    I, however, be careful to make sure that the leaf pile is huge.

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