Published tonight on Facebook...
I'm going to float a radical notion out here- just put it on the stoop, see if maybe the cat licks it up, you dig? It's not a silver bullet to all the problems America is facing, that's for sure- but if we're seeking an explanation for why educational standards seem to be slipping, why the generations younger than us seem to be more cynical, more disillusioned and populated with more of what could be charitably called 'little punks' but are more accurately called 'little shits', then I may have an explanation for the overall degradation of culture in contemporary America today. It's pretty damn ground breaking, if you're ready for it. Are you ready? Are you sure?
OK: we've dumbed down our playgrounds too much. Granted, in America today, there's far too much dumbing down going on everywhere, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the need and desire to dumb everything down began at some point in the late 80s and early 90s when they began to change playgrounds into these plastic, low-to-the ground, everything has rounded corners- just generally boring pieces of equipment that don't inspire anything other than a sigh of despair from even the most jaded child today.
You know what I'm talking about right? When we (my 80s generation and myself) were young, there wasn't any of this ground up tire shit underneath the monkey bars. Oh no, I'm old enough to remember when there was gravel underneath the monkey bars and that taught you a lot more about life than any time in the public education system does. What happens on the monkey bars stays with you a lot longer than any algebra class- because there's nothing like the sheer terror of being 6 years old and halfway out across the monkey bars and suddenly realizing that your arms hurt like hell and there's a long drop to sharp gravel below you. That's real life. No ground up tires to bounce you safely back up into Mom's arms- no in real life, you fall, you cut your knee up and it hurts like hell. The lesson the playgrounds of my youth taught me was that then you get right back on those monkey bars again and try it again!
See? Life really does begin and end on the playground. There's that awesome sense of accomplishment you felt as a kid when you made it across the monkey bars for the first time- or when you finally got up the nerve to swing as high as you could and then jump off into the air, just to see how high you would go. You set goals for yourself and you met those goals. Yeah, when I was young, playgrounds rocked. You got to learn about real life (it can hurt like hell sometimes) and you got to set goals (like swinging as high as you can and jumping off) and then you got to taste the glory of achieving those goals, small and insignificant as they now might seem.
Today however, playgrounds seem to have lost their magic touch. Sure, kids play on them and don't really give a shit, because, after all, they're like 5 and a playground is a playground when you're five. You don't think about the bigger picture all that much. But now, it seems like people want to keep kids in a bubble of over protectiveness to an almost unhealthy level. Everything needs to be plastic, because little Johnny can't get a splinter- that would be bad. Everything needs rounded corners, because little Jane might get a boo-boo and we can't be having that. I was somewhat astonished to learn that vaccinations for chicken pox are now increasingly common which is a shock, because when I was a kid, getting the chicken pox meant that Mom whipped out the phone tree and anyone who hadn't had it yet got to come over and play with you. Chicken pox meant you itched like hell, to be sure, but it also meant you got one helluva rockin' playdate.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating that we put a bed of rusty nails below the monkey bars in the name of toughening our kids up. I'm sure my perspective will be slightly different when I'm a parent, because I'm sure no parent like to see their kids get hurt- even a little bit. But at the same time, the biggest and best lesson I think that I learned growing up was that when you fall down, even though you might get hurt doing so, it's important to stand right back up again.
Dumbing down our playgrounds too much will let us lose the opportunity to pass that all-important lesson on to the next generation. Playground should be adventures, they should be daring monuments to the imagination. They shouldn't be earth-bound, plastic and safe. One of the travesties that marked the real death of my childhood was when the City of Iowa City (or whomever) decided that after the expansion of the Public Library downtown, they were going to replace the old playground equipment with a shiny, new, boring set. I will never, ever, ever, forgive whomever decided to do that, because that old playground by the Library? That was the best playground EVER.
This playground was a wooden palace: it had a drawbridge, a curly slide, tall fire poles for people to slide down. A super long metal slide at the very end that was damn hot in the summer. It had towers and big wooden blocks of different heights that were staggered up the side of the equipment like a mountain that you could scramble up. And it had a big yellow ladder that you could climb up to get to the drawbridge- and for some reason, I'm not sure why, underneath that (because there was a piece of wood, then the ladder) there was a ledge, tucked away that wasn't really connected to anything much.
That ledge was magical. It was bad-ass. When you were big enough to climb down there, it officially made you one of the 'cool kids' and if you had the stones to jump down from that secret ledge into the sand? Well shit man- you were a demi-God amongst mere mortals. At least for the rest of that afternoon, anyway. Yeah, playgrounds can, under the right circumstances, teach kids an awful lot about life- but we have to be careful: we want them to learn those lessons, not inadvertantly shield them from them in the name of wrapping them up tight and safe.
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