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I used to play conkers at school in England, however my children didn't. The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.
by nickcw 2y ago
I used to play conkers at school in England, however my children didn't.
The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.
I asked my 17 year old this morning and he had never even heard of the game of conkers.
So I think the age of conkers is passing, alas.
- martin_ 2y agoAlso played at school in England.... probably ~22 years ago now I'd guess! Sad to hear that era is over!
- schoen 2y agoWhat are the health and safety risks from this game? Do the chestnuts fragment violently when they break up?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 946789987649 2y agoaccidentally hitting each other
- schoen 2y agoI can't really visualize the amount of momentum involved, or how sharp the chestnut is. Is that specifically about eye injuries, or could it hurt someone some other way?
- lazide 2y agoIf you whip it above your head at a good 100-200 rpm, anything is possible.
- schoen 2y agoAfter writing the above comment, I watched videos of people playing conkers and now I understand how it could, in theory, cause an eye injury. It was hard for me to visualize how close the defender's conker is to the defender's body before seeing the video. I was somehow wrongly imagining that it was being supported on a much longer string or with the help of other objects somehow.
- ryanjshaw 2y agoLiterally the first video I watched, 2:28 min in, kid gets knocked in the teeth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egBjZaKNLuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egBjZaKNLuc
- arethuza 2y agoAh yes "accidentally"... ;-)
- ratherbefuddled 2y agoMostly it increases teacher stress levels having to referee.
- mellosouls 2y agoImagine swinging two stones (many techniques to harden conkers including the game itself evolving the brutes by elimination) together at high speed with fingers and faces in very near proximity.
- gandalfian 2y ago<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.> I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.
- _dain_ 2y agoNot a myth. I went to school during the twilight of the conker. It absolutely died because risk-averse teachers banned it, to howls of protest from us kids.
- petemir 2y agoThe myth is the game being a health hazard, not if it was banned (or not).
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoJust another brick in the wall.
- darrenf 2y agoThe HSE posted on their mythbusting site that it was a myth at a national level, but I suppose individual schools might have done so? https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.gov.uk/myth/september.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.g... Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety." Certainly there was at least one school that got goggles for pupils to wear while playing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm
- walthamstow 2y agoThe academy run by Lord Ashcroft has banned bicycles so I guess anything is possible when you're outside of local authority control
- zarzavat 2y agoIt's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.
- treerock 2y agoI was out for a walk yesterday, and kids were throwing sticks up trees trying to knock the chestnuts down, so I don't think it's dead completely. I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.
- mellosouls 2y agoIt's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones I know kids have a lot more money these days but I refuse to believe they are swinging two smartphones together instead of conkers.
- joelanman 2y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carrotpop.www.smth&hl=en&pli=1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carrotpop....
- dgacmu 2y agoI would like to introduce you to my six year old. Mind you, it's much more likely the two phones involved would be mine and my wife's.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoI've seen enough clips of kids playing with their phone to drop them in the water to know that they probably would.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoNot for long. Schools are looking at banning smartphones.
- BoxOfRain 2y agoI'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!
- red_admiral 2y agoDrilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.
- OJFord 2y agoI'm between your ages and we played it. Not a lot, it definitely occupies a larger area of national psyche than it's played I think, but we did. Yes school banned it, but when did that ever stop us?
- greatgib 2y agoI saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools: In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]
- ljf 2y agoInteresting, as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy - though no doubt some people are allergic to them.
- joncrocks 2y agoIt's not quite that simple. The line isn't quite as hard between seed and 'nut'. Namely people may commonly refer to things as a nut when it is a seed. e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.
- _heimdall 2y agoThis rabbit hole goes deep. Berries are particularly poorly named - stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries but tomatoes and bananas are.
- barrkel 2y agoThis is only a problem if you mistake words for scientific classifications, instead of ways to convey meaning between communicating humans. Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.
- _heimdall 2y agoI was sticking with the context of the GP though. Maybe its pedantic to point out that many berries aren't technically berries, but that's much the same as the point that many nuts are actually seeds.
- Oarch 2y agoArguably with the steel conker endemic happening before us there are finally some valid health reasons...