“PLAY THE GAME!”

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 125, 19 February 1921, Page 12

“PLAY THE GAME!”

CHANGES IN RECENT YEARS ORGANISED GAMES FOR THE PRIMARY SCHOOLS 'To a largo extent children attending the primary schools are pretty well left to their own devices in the matter of games, and on the whole are very ready in the adoption or invention of ideas in that connection. School games change with the years, particularlj- those games confined to the playground, and beyond the limits of standard games, such as cricket, football, and tennis. Where is the school to-day that follows the paperchase, the old "hare and hounds” game of forty years ago? The school boys of to-day would not know the meaning of the game "Brewer,” a chasing game in which the ono who is "he” has to chase and tag another with clenched hands before he ceases to be “he." Boys still play leap-frog more or less, but "fly-the-garter” seems to have drifted into the limbo of the past. Top-spinning and marbles still have their own lure, but the rules of the latter game are quite unrecognisable to the school boy of a quarter of a century ago. Girls used to do nothing more unmaidenly than "bkip and play "rounders,” but to-day they have stolen hockey and cricket away from the men, and in sonic colleges actually play football. "Cocky-hole,” in which the principles of golf are applied to marbles, used to lie a passion with both boys and girls, and in latter years the girls played “back-knocks,” in which the marbles have to be knocked against a wall with a certain strength, so as to bring them within spanning distance of the opponent’s marble. In another era there was a craze for fly-poles, parallel bars, horizontal bars, etc., and regular exercises had to lie taken on the same. Several nasty accidents brought the fly-pole into disrepute, and the other athletic equipment gradually disappeared from the playgrounds, in favour of “prisoners,” "collaring," “hop-Scotch,” tennis, cricket, football, and swimming.

There was a time, too, when in. most of the schools the boys were provided with wooden cutlasses, and in Wellington they were taught how skilfully to carve an enemy by the late Monsieur de Mey d’Alkemade, who was at one time n soldier in the French Army. Another wave of militarism brought the dummy carbines organisation into School Cadets by the Government under the late Major Loveday. Now only the secondary schools have cadet companies, and the younger lads have to link up with the Boy Scouts if they wish to appear in uniform. Bar-bells, dumb-bells, Swedish drill, Indian clubs, all seem to have, disappeared in recent years from the primary school athletic curriculum, and nothing seems to have exactly taken their place. There are teachers who approve of devoting certain school hours—even if they only amount to half a day per week—to organised school games, played under the direction of the teachers, so as to ensure that even the most lethargic of children will be compelled to take some exercise, and thus improve their physical stamina. This idea was carried out on Friday afternoon in the case of the Clyde Quay School, the scholars of which adjourned to the Basin Reserve at 2 p.m. and frollicked in the sunshine to their hearts' content whilst judicious teachers dropped a hint from time to time as to how "to play the game.”