When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”
His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.
Right. We can infer in 1990 that in the power structures of NYC, people were motivated to de-risk playgrounds. Agreed. The larger point is that the earlier post was written by someone who was ~10 in 1990, and still in middle school or so during this quote. The people "in the power structures" in NYC and the ~young kids (in the schools out in the country side), are non-intersecting sets in a venn diagram. As a point of history, The destruction of playgrounds was a byproduct of Urban politics, and then became a political/cultural issue that was a holy-cow of school administrators. Again, this is a venn-diagram (urban, teachers) that is not overlapping with the accused (rural, student).
Plus, policies are not made by a generation but politicians and social and economic circumstances. There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere. The narrative is in the "not even wrong" category.
I can't make any sense of your perspective. Policies very much are made by a generation; they are very much not made by politicians. Look at the discussion of drinking -- politicians have decided that no one shall drink before the age of 21, the masses have decided something different, and the masses are having things 100% their own way. The society reflects what the populace wants.
> There's never been a meeting of whatever generation to decide policy, that happens elsewhere.
Of course there's never been a meeting. The generation doesn't meet. But it does decide policy. Who meets to set the price of copper?
This comment is bad math, bad history, and bad analysis.
Please. Try. Harder.
[NB: GP was <10yrs old in 1990. He was not the parks comissioner of New York City in the 1990s. Etc.]