One of the differences is that when I was in school, our teacher supervised us for everything. There were no “aides” that came in to help. The teacher was always watching — she even ate lunch with us. So, there was no pulling the wool over her eyes. And there was plenty of opportunity to run off steam and plenty of opportunity to organize our own games — something that little league, etc. does not allow.
On rainy days (which were few and far between in CA) we had Folk Dancing.
When we got to 7th grade and above, we had an hour of PE daily. I don’t think the kids get that much any more. I hated PE — except for dance == because I never made good grades. But, it was necessary.
In elementary school, we walked to and from school twice a day because we had to go home for lunch and walk back again. In addition, we had 15 min. of recess in the morning and 15 min. of recess in the afternoon.
In Jr. High, we had one hour for lunch - after we ate lunch we could go to the rec room and dance or listen to records or play ping pong or just hang out and talk to our friends. Or we could walk up to the avenue and buy doughnuts and junk in the bakery. We had a full 10 minutes for passing time. Same thing in high school. We could drive out to Burger Chef if we had a car during lunch. Kids have 20 minutes for lunch now and about 5 min. between classes. We had lots of time to recreate and decompress. Not so anymore.