This exact same picture has been featured on BoingBoing before.
Except then it described as fun and contrasted favorably with modern playgrounds where “safety was taken into consideration – jail-like equipment.”
Make up your mind, mutants!
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They’ve done a few studies with preschools here in Australia with schools that have switched to higher-risk playgrounds. Injuries tend to go down by around 30 to 40%.
While the new grounds may look dangerous — a towering fort (with open edges), 1.6-metre-high balance beams, and climbing walls (without a fall mattress) — the data shows the opposite.
There has actually been a 43 per cent reduction in reported injuries at the centre.
Anecdata point: until about grade 2 my son was a lunatic climber, but he knew his limits and mostly worked within them. He mastered the 5-foot climbing walls at playgrounds before he could talk.
The day he finally fell and broke his arm, he was four and at a playground with lots of rubber and mulch padding. He fell off a short slide (about chest-high on an adult) that was brightly coloured plastic and for all the world looked like a big toy. He was treating it like a toy, not like something you could fall off. I can’t know for sure, but I believe that if it looked a bit more dangerous, he may have acted like it needed a bit of respect.
ETA: full disclosure: despite some similarities in the broken arm story, I don’t know anyone in the link:
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I grew up in the 60’s as well, and didn’t see anything here that wasn’t similar, if not exactly the same, as what we had at my school. And we were lucky - at the area country schools (yes, there were still one room country schools in the 60’s) kids were fortunate to have a slide to play on, most often it was a tree. I loved climbing the monkey bars, and hardly ever got hurt. Once I got a big blister on my hand from sliding down the maypole after shinnying up to the top. Of course, I also had a science teacher who taught us to make gunpowder, and a shop teacher with only three fingers on one hand, so …
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I vaguely remember this being discussed on BB before. I think there was also a 99 percent invisible podcast on it.
If memory serves, they found the biggest problem were dangerous things that weren’t obvious, like a slippery gap that you could get caught in. Dangerous things that were obvious, like heights, were much less of an issue. For example, the runged steps to a slide were more of a concern than the slide itself. More recent playgrounds take this into account.
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It’s a highly defensible position in the Thermopylae sense, to be sure, but as soon as those kids master ranged weapons he’s a goner.
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Nice… Nice one!
That’s just grate!
Also, did anyone else have the half-buried tires to play leap frog over?
We had something kind of like this at my elementary school (1980s):
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and the lack of vaccines! but here we are, with no playgrounds and an increasing anti-vaccine culture. sigh.
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