National Post:
The games children play in schoolyards are famously horrible, if you stop and think about them.
Tag, for example, singles out one poor participant, often the slowest child, as the dehumanized “It,” who runs vainly in pursuit of the quicker ones. Capture the Flag is nakedly militaristic. British Bulldog has obvious jingoistic colonial themes. Red Ass, known in America as Butts Up, involves deliberate imposition of corporal punishment on losers.
But none rouse the passions of reform-minded educational progressives quite like dodgeball, the team sport in which players throw balls at each other, trying to hit their competitors and banish them to the sidelines of shame.
When the Canadian Society for the Study of Education meets in Vancouver at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a trio of education theorists will argue that dodgeball is not only problematic, in the modern sense of displaying hierarchies of privilege based on athletic skill, but that it is outright “miseducative.”
I never played dodgeball in gym class. We played only in boy’s gym class, and the coach made the sides get so close to each other that when we threw the ball at each other, it left whelps when it hit. We played inside a gym, not outside where it could legitimately be called dodgeball. We were danger-close. He called it “murderball,” and we obliged him.
I guess these Canadian theorists wouldn’t like that, huh? Hey, I was wondering, for men who are headed off to the US Marine Corps to learn to defend the country and who are learning to be men when they are boys, and who must survive in the brutality of combat, will those Canadian “theorists” be there to help the sides hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
