"What we require is that children do not touch each other."

Of course. Everyone knows cooties is the number one cause of death among grade school children.

Someday we'll be sending our children to school in contraptions like these.

Only it won't be cute then.

Story's over a week old. Get with it.

If the story's old, then it was unnecessary for you to read and comment -- yet, you did.

Hahaha. Love Jay.

Obviously, Ken is just a disgruntled cootie carrier.

Well, they outlawed wisdom and knowledge at schools, long ago.

Outlawing tag was the logical next step.

You have to blame the trial lawyers for this one. Some kid being chased might fall and sue the school.

Trial lawyers are turning our schools into wimp villages. In Minnesota, schools never used to close for snow or cold. Now the schools close if we have a 4" snowfall or the temperature falls below zero. Why? The schools are afraid of being sued because driving is more dangerous.

Jay,
You leave my cooties out of this. You hear me?

Welcome to the nanny state. Back in the early 1990s when I was at primary school we werent allowed to play what was known as bulldog stinger. Basically people had to get from one end of the playground to the other without the person or people who were "it" hitting them with a tennis ball.

Banned unless we used a soft (sponge like) ball which defeated the point.

The incident above defines pathetic.

"What we require is that children do not touch each other."

Hey, when other schools are teaching kids it's okay to touch each other, this seems like a novelty.

I don't know if any of you are teachers. I am. Policies that make schools look like idiot factories and not generally initiated by trial lawyers; they're initiated by complaining parents.

I heard yesterday that a colleague faced parent complaints because he starts a student off at 100 points and then takes points away for nonparticipation. "Too negative," the complaining parent said.

After that, you have calls to the principal, and then the superintendent, and then angry demonstrations at school board meetings and sniping parking-lot conversations between parents looking to blame someone for their kid's irresponsibility.

The upshot: some new, foolish policy like, "No teacher in our district can ever subtract points--only add," or "No playing tag."

This is how it works. Take it from me.

Michael, I teach and most of these idiotic decisions come from "progressives" within the schools themselves. They could really care what the parents think. In fact, in CA a judge ruled that schools could teach kids ages 7 and up anything they want to about sex, in spite of the parents' wishes. It's no wonder why 50% of public school teachers send their kids to private schools.

Dino:

You work in a vastly different environment than I do if parent complaint is not a regular source of problems and changes at school.

I'll agree that many teachers don't necessarily WANT input from parents--mainly, in my experience, because complaining parents don't know how to do the job, and trained teachers do--but everybody listens. If you don't, life gets bad.

I worked at a school where pressure from a single parent who was concerned about how her child would deal with the upper grades eventually led to the school's changing a successful departmentalized program in fifth and sixth grades to a self-contained program that did little to prepare students for middle school and high school structure.

Where I work, teachers are not the source of bizarre decisions; rather, they're the ones saying, "Why the hell is this happening?"

I'm glad for you that troublesome parent input in the process is not a problem for you. I sometimes wish I could say the same thing.

What about the 'no tag backs rule'?
How will the new ruling effect tag strategy?
Is it reviewable by instant replay?
If frozen is a team mate allowed to tag the frozen player to unfreeze them or is that now illegal touching as well?

I agree with Jake about trial lawyers.

If I may paraphrase what I understood Jake to be saying; he's saying that school administrators fear being sued by trial lawyers, thus, the school administrators initiate policies, which, in their estimation, decreases the risk of any situation (usually child injury on school premises) that could potentially elicit a lawsuit.

Trial lawyers do the dirty work of suing school districts, but generally only after they've been contacted by a complaining parent who is upset that their little Janie fell down while playing tag on the playground.

Decades ago, if a parent walked into a trial lawyer's office and said, "My Janie fell down while playing tag at school---I want to sue !", the trial lawyer would have laughed at such logic.

Since our society has been brain-washed into assigning blame for any little mishap in life, nowadays that parent walks into the trial lawyer's office and says, "My Janie fell down while playing tag at school---I want to sue !", and the trial lawyer smiles, and says, "Yes ! And I'm confident a jury will see things our way !

I'd worry more about the standard of your education system before worrying about this.