Years ago, before the rash of in-school violence and crime, school-related deaths and injuries belonged where they were supposed to — on the playground, during recess.

We speak of a time when playgrounds were part of a child’s education. We learned about multiplication in math class, and then went outside where we learned how to survive.

We saw the kid who tried to do a handstand on the swing, we saw him scream and fall, we saw the ambulance come and take him away, and in the end, we learned that standing on our heads while on a moving swing was a bad idea.

How many times were there accidents from the fateful flights of swing jumping? Don’t you remember swing jumping? There were other names for it: swing diving, free-flight and swing-free. It didn’t matter what this was called — it all came down to one simple task: Swing as high as possible, and then jump from the swing at the highest point.

The result was a 50-50 chance of survival and a 50-50 chance of fun. Sure, there were the occasional broken arms, but that was encouragement to get back out there and get our own “war wounds.”

As if swings weren’t enough fun, the greater minds of playground-equipment designing gave us the tire swing. This little gem was a double threat. While gyrating on this mosquito-breeding-ground on a chain, one had to watch out for his fingers, while keeping an eye out for the occasional wandering 3-year-old. Get your fingers caught in the chain, and suddenly you’re careening around at Mach 3 with your fingers twisted between two links of metal. That was real fun.

Walk onto a playground today, and you will see a plastic eyesore, carefully engineered and designed so that even the stupidest kid could not hurt himself, no matter how hard he tries. Everything is plastic-coated — the chains, the floors, the screws. Even the slide is made of flimsy plastic, which creates a static charge upon use that’s powerful enough to jump-start a car.

Sure, we had slides too, but they were scorching-hot metal, with sharp seams along the sides and rusty bolts at the top and bottom. A trip down one of these puppies in the middle of August was a sure trip to the hospital’s burn ward for second-degree burns on the ass. And when we slid down, we didn’t land on mulch — we had gravel, blacktop or just a dirt hole. When a classmate sliced his or her arm open trying to slide down on hands and knees, we didn’t see a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Instead, we learned a lesson: Look out for sharp, rusty metal, and get that weekly tetanus shot. Sure, there were those who tried to outsmart the system. There was that one “daringly intelligent” student who thought he could walk down the slide. The result always was the same: second-degree burns on the forehead.

Playgrounds today are designed by lawyers, unlike before, when all it took was a high-school dropout with welding skills to design and throw together an assortment of metal and wood creations. As if that was not enough, the yokels usually threw in some old tires for fun. Now that’s real recycling. Just try and break your arm on one of these new playgrounds.

When we came home — bloodied and bruised because of a failed attempt to jump from the monkey bars onto the spiderweb made of chain — our parents got mad at us for doing something stupid. They didn’t tell us it was OK, and call up the lawyer to see how much they could get out of the school for our actions. Parents today are all about blaming others, rather than taking responsibility for raising a moron.

So what’s the problem with the new, safer equipment? Why not save one or two children while still entertaining the rest? I’ll tell you why: By protecting kids, we are creating a generation of idiots.

Kids today are too protected. By never letting them see a schoolyard chum’s tibia poking through the skin as a result of a jungle gym/ roller skate hybrid experiment, we rob them of the understanding of how not to get hurt. We can see it now: In four or five years, the grade schoolers of today will be released into the real, non-plastic-coated world, and a good percentage of them will end up impaled on the first metal object they find. We fear for our gene pool.