SHOULD PAPER BE OUTLAWED IN ALL SCHOOLS?

SHOULD PAPER BE OUTLAWED IN ALL SCHOOLS?

One of the childhood games that we used to play in school was dodgeball. Two teams took turns throwing a soft rubber ball at players on the other team, who were confined to a circle, in order to eliminate them from the game. When one team was eliminated, the teams switched roles. We had a lot of fun. When the game was over we all remained friends and no lasting grudges were formed.

Today, groups are claiming that dodgeball is too dangerous for kids to be playing. Dodgeball has been banned from schools in Texas, Maine, Massachusetts, Utah, Maryland, and New York under the claim that the game is unfair and exclusionary. Children are being assaulted and marginalized, and the unfair victims of powerful forces.

My own experience was a simple one. I tried to hang around the back of the circle or near the edges of the circle trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. I was usually hit in the legs or back by the ball and left the circle to bide my time. I was not intimidated, scarred for life, or made to feel inferior or a victim. It was a GAME!

Today, educated minds searching for some meaningful topics to earn a research grant are scraping the bottom of the barrel to find topics that do not really need to be researched. For example, another blog -to-come studies the effects of sleeping in a dark room and its relation to weight gain. I didn’t know this was a pressing social problem. Some desperate researchers from UBC decided that it was time to demonize a childhood game until they can come up with a better research question.

Our advanced educators, after some of their own analysis, generated some media coverage with their “findings” that concluded that dodgeball must be eliminated. “Dodgeball reinforces the five faces of oppression defined (by theorist Iris Marion Young?) as marginalization, powerlessness, and helplessness of those perceived as weaker individuals through the exercise of violence and dominance by those who are considered more powerful," reads the abstract of the study discussed recently at the Canadian Society for the Study of Education in Vancouver.

That sounds like another attempt by desperate university researchers to draw totally unproven conclusions to a non-problem. Dodgeball is not developing Ninja or Nazi warriors intent on overthrowing the weak and challenged. Nor is it inflicting serious pain, any more than playing hockey or basketball, to the children in our schools. Children who might go home feeling inadequate or crying are more than likely experiencing problems that go well beyond their failings at playing dodgeball.

Our schools have become sanitized, by well meaning but overprotective parents, in banning all kinds of children’s games. Playing tag or baseball or football or Red Rover have all been stopped in our school yards because a child might get injured.

It’s time to get serious folks! If a child suffers a paper cut in school, do you think we should ban sharp edged sheets of paper?