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Comment by gandalfian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It is a myth that it was banned nationally for health & safety (“nanny state”) reasons, as was incorrectly reported in the press (mostly in the red-top papers), but some schools certainly did ban the game.

This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.

Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).

The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.

Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.

> The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.

It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.

I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.

The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.

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[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…

The 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.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

The headteacher said himself that story was misreported — he bought the goggles as a joke.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...

The academy run by Lord Ashcroft has banned bicycles so I guess anything is possible when you're outside of local authority control

I remember being a kid in the 80's, and being told by a primary school teacher we couldn't play conkers anymore :( We'd only just discovered it too!

Not 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.

The myth is the game being a health hazard, not if it was banned (or not).

Just another brick in the wall.

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