Wednesday, June 18, 2003

BOY’S PLAY INCORRECT

"The punitive imposition of rights not asked for grows common in North America. Note the banning of dodgeball in the public schools as violence, and the attempt to keep boys from roughhousing. Why? Kids want to play dodgeball. If they didn't, they wouldn't. We aren't talking compulsory dodgeball. And boys like to wrestle. It's why they do it. (Anybody thought of that?) But teachers don't like to roughhouse. So, following the totalitarian instincts of prigs and prudes and the self-consciously inadequate everywhere, they make sappy passivity a human right. Then they inflict it on kids who would rather have scarlet fever.It's rule by parsnips, I tell you, by smugly hostile hop-toads with damp fingers."

More here.

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