When I was young, a lot of time was spent both inside and outside of P.E. playing games on our own, including tag and its variants: freeze tag and blob tag. When I was in ninth grade, one of the best things in P.E. was dodgeball, or bombardment, which is the term Mr. Visser and some others use. (Admittedly, after five months of volleyball because the golf unit was canceled, anything else was the best thing.)

You know something’s wrong when a college student is getting nostalgic. That, sadly, is where this column is going.

The first recent incident, neither the first nor the last of its kind, comes from New Jersey. A news item from Monday on the Web site of Philadelphia’s WPVI.com reports that schools in New Jersey are banning tag and dodgeball at school. In Long Hill, a student code of conduct included a ban on tag. Instead, the site says, “a modified version of the game is played indoors with plenty of supervision.”

“The idea of loosely running around and chasing each other is not safe,” the site reported Long Hill Superintendent Arthur DiBenedetto telling The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Wait a second. Kids loosely running around and chasing each other? Unstructured play?

Oh no!

We certainly don’t want kids loosely running around and having fun on their own now, do we? That code of conduct is a slap in the face to every kid who signed it; imagine living in fear of disciplinary action because you spontaneously said, “Let’s play tag! I’m it!”

In addition to tag, several New Jersey schools have banned dodgeball because “officials feared that some students were being singled out as targets by bullies.” Well, as hard as it may be for some to admit, that’s going to happen, regardless of what you are doing. It’s something we pessimists tend to call “life.”

It may be worth noting that New Jersey is one of two states that forbids you to pump your own gas. Perhaps banning tag and dodgeball fit with New Jersey’s idea of protection.

But then again, maybe not, as unstructured play is under assault across the country, even in Iowa. Monday’s Des Moines Register featured an article about recess at Wright Elementary School — or more precisely, the lack of time dedicated to it.

Some parents at Wright are concerned that there’s not enough time set aside for recess. According to the article, they “also said that sometimes recess is a classroom activity in disguise, which parents said is a poor substitute for the unstructured recess young children need.”

Here, at least, the parents know that free play is something every kid should grow up with.

Wright Principal Susan Tallman said recess at the school could also consist of “students completing a quiet activity, moving their bodies to music and visiting special activity centers in the classroom.”

You know what we used to call that? School work, music class and activities during class.

That’s not recess. That’s school. The only time activities counted as recess was when we were kept inside, and even then we were free to choose our games from the cupboard.

It could be worse. The entire school system in Atlanta eliminated recess several years ago. I know from the kid’s side what it is like to be a student waiting to get out and run around. I’d hate to be an elementary teacher in Atlanta.

But that’s what’s in vogue today, and has been since about the early ’90s. Kids should not be kids. We have to tear down the 10-foot-high metal slides and replace them with four-foot plastic ones. Recess needs to be structured, with set activities, if we allow recess at all. Letting the children run wild and free, letting them choose what games to play, is anathema to everything.

It is, apparently, a wonder that we as kids ever got out of the 1980s alive.

Then again, two things didn’t exist back then that are rampant now. First, the attitude that it’s not my fault, and I need to sue someone. Lawsuits were cited in the WPVI article as spurring the New Jersey districts to ban tag and dodgeball. Second, the drug culture — that is, the legal drug culture. Is your child acting up, running around outside or doing something else that is (gasp!) childish?

We have a pill for that. As one quip from the late ’90s said, “Remember kids, just say no to drugs. Now line up for your Ritalin.”

Let’s let kids be kids and have time for unstructured free play. Let them play tag and dodgeball. Otherwise, the only thing we’re doing is raising children to be a nation of lawsuit-happy, activity-impaired and perhaps even unimaginative wimps. We have enough problems with that in people who have passed through childhoods filled with free play; imagine how much worse it will be when kids are never given the chance to begin with.

Jeff Morrison

is a junior in journalism

and mass communication and political science

from Traer. He is a

copy editor at the Daily.