Webster’s defines “tag” as “a game in which the player who is it chases others and tries to touch one of them who then becomes it.” Wikipedia explains that the game, also known in Britain as “it, tip you’re it” is “a playground game that involves one or more players chasing other players in an attempt to ‘tag’ or touch them, usually with their hands.”
So is the game of “tag” still “tag” if tagging is banned?
That is the question for the Mercer County School District in Washington state and for some unhappy parents.
It all started with a social media report earlier this week when a group of parents, responding to what they had heard was a ban on the game of tag in elementary schools, formed a group called “Support ‘tag’ at Recess.”
It was their impression that there was indeed a ban and the word soon spread to the news media…
Sounds like a ban to me
“The Mercer Island School District and school teams have recently revisited expectations for student behavior to address student safety. This means while at play, especially during recess and unstructured time, students are expected to keep their hands to themselves. The rationale behind this is to ensure the physical and emotional safety of all students…”
Thursday the school district attempted to clarify. What it really has in mind, said a statement, was a “new form of tag-like running games to minimize the issues of ‘you were tagged/no I wasn’t’ or ‘the tag was too hard and felt more like a hit.’ Tag is not banned,” it insisted. “We plan to support our elementary students with new games and alternatives that still involve running and exercising.”
Running. Exercising. But no mention of touching, however, raising the question of how a child can become “it” without being touched.
RTFA. It goes on and on, here and there. The object is central to what I’ve been watching happen to education in America since the 1950’s. How to educate our children is now grounded in becoming a vaguely Freudian assembly for the purpose of group therapy.
I can understand any portion of our alienated society trying to come to grips with stupidity, grand illusions, imperial arrogance, bigotry, misogyny, the whole ball of bullshit our culture is capable of. Replacing education with touchy-feely fear and trembling aids nothing more than ignorance.