When is Tag Not Tag?

When it is a game called "Jailbreak."

"This is not the old-fashioned tag, where you could use two fingers and you would be it and move on to someone else," Hooker said. The game, she said, has become much more aggressive. "I call it the nouveau tag."

This tag involves grabbing people who do not necessarily know they are playing and possibly bumping them to the ground. "Then the kids do 'pyramiding' or 'towering.' They pile on each other. [Sometimes] they call it 'jailhouse' or 'jailbreak,' " because the child has to break out, she said.[Michael Alison Chandler at the WaPo]

This doesn't sound like tag at all. It sounds like assault and battery on the playground.

The principal of the school banned these violent variations of tag during recess and convinced the PE teacher(s) to teach the kids how to play basic touch tag without adding assault and battery into the mix. And yet this article presents it as if the principal was in the wrong, and out of his mind for banning an innocent child's game such as tag.

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