Why I Hate how PE is taught in Public Schools

What P.E. tells us about the Philosophy of Education

Photo by Honey Yanibel Minaya Cruz on Unsplash

My daughter's middle school PE class has a target of a 10 minute mile. The kids hate it. Maybe 90% of the kids can't hit that target. Also, the teacher doesn’t train the kids, like run them twice a week un-timed, or teach them how to improve their running fitness and endurance. Instead, the class does a timed run maybe once every few weeks. If you hit the target, you get a pass so you don’t have to run it the next time. Running a 10 minute mile is a "test" for them, and then kids feel bad about themselves that they can't reach it. Some just walk it, knowing they’re going to fail it anyway.

This is all really bad PE teaching. The reward for good exercise shouldn’t be a pass on doing more exercise next week. Fitness tests shouldn’t be actual tests, they should be diagnostics for goal-setting, the point is for the class to try and get fit. I feel like if you're 12, 13, 14 and not physically challenged, a 10 minute mile daily isn't that high of a fitness goal. Its a warm up. And I’m not a fitness buff or anything. A ten minute mile is probably my level of fitness. I don’t think I could have done a ten minute mile in middle school, but that’s also because I had really crappy PE too.

The PE class my daughter describes is very similar to the ones I had in middle school. Hers are even less structured on a day-to-day basis. We at least had daily warm up exercises like jumping jacks and burpees. Then the P.E. teacher gave us a ball for whatever sport we were playing for the week, and said “go play” and then she would stand there monitoring for fights. Occasionally there would be some lesson about the sport, like every couple monthss there was instruction about why you don’t put the flag in flag football on your crotch, or how to serve in volleyball, but there were definitely no daily lessons. I hated PE, my wife hated PE, my child hates PE, and this hatred of PE led to a good decade where my self-conception was that I was not the exercise-type, I was not the sports type. My wife carries that attitude to this day, and that is my child’s self-conception. She already has a natural inclination to say no to physical activities. PE is making it worse.

All of this is to say that physical education in Southern California public schools is simply unforgivable. If education is supposed to inspire a lifelong love of learning, PE should at least do that for learning about and regularly working toward physical fitness. It does the opposite. It is unforgivable even if you have a sporty kid. I have friends whose kids are in soccer, water polo, martial arts, baseball, and others. Organized youth sports is on the other end of spectrum of bad, as my former colleagues Chris Bjork and Bill Hoynes at Vassar have written about, taking a love of play and exercise and transforming it into a time-sucking, joy-zapping business of over-scheduling and combative parenting. But even the sporty kids get next to nothing out of their school P.E class, at least if they’re in public schools. P.E. seems to have done the impossible in making physical play something children both dread and want to avoid.

That we don’t have better physical education is even more unforgivable given that we live in the era of the influencer. Say what you want about the values displayed in the proliferation of fitness-influencing. At least it is educational and motivational. We can get the basic differences between aerobic and anaerobic exercises, the different kinds of resistance training from weights to machines to calisthenics, how to scale up, plateauing, injury-prevention, the difference between concentric, eccentric, and isometric strength, and so forth. A P.E. teacher has a student for 50 minutes every day for the entire school year, for at least five years. Why is it that children don’t know these basics including the varieties of ways bodies can be fit and unfit, like balance, flexibility, range of motion, strength, and cardiovascular endurance? People very naturally like to self-assess their fitness if they knew the relevant metrics. Its really easy to become over-obsessed with metrics, rather than dismissive of them.

God I hope I’m wrong in generalizing, and please tell me its better in your state or locale, but there is such a big gap between what we are preaching in public policy about the health of children and the way physical education is taught in public schools. “Too many children are obese!” “We’re bringing back the Presidential fitness test!”, I keep hearing in the media. I remember the Presidential fitness test, I didn’t do all that well, couldn’t do a single pull-up. My sit and reach was, and still is, abysmal. I could do maybe 25 sit-ups in a minute. But what I don’t remember at all was training for the Presidential fitness test. I didn’t get a teacher who started out recording each student’s baseline of mile-run, push-ups, sit-and-reach, pull-ups, and sit-ups, and worked on our fitness every day so that by the time the test came around, we were fitter than when we started. A generation above mine talks about climbing the rope. I was 44 years old until I learned that there is actually a proper technique to learning the rope climb, and ways to train your grip strength and legs to do it better. I had to learn it by watching Chris Hemsworth do it on his National Geographic series Limitless. It wasn’t until I was 30 that I learned that one way to increase your running endurance and speed was to do high intensity interval running, rather than just trying to go faster each time you run the mile. Sprinting 200m then walking 200m for a mile turned out to significantly increase my endurance fitness in long distance running. I never got so much as a hint about ways to be fitter from any of my P.E. teachers. Did you boomers get instruction and practice on the rope climb or was it sink or swim?

In the philosophy of education, there are all matters of debate over the purpose of schooling; is it to prepare a democratic citizenry, prepare kids for their future vocations, childcare and surrogate parenting? These are all good questions. I don’t know the answers. No one ever questions that there is a point to physical education, because it is just so obvious that physical fitness is valuable. But none of this seems to have translated in enough public middle school P.E. teachers having a purposive curriculum for physical fitness. The mind learns, and the body learns, why aren’t P.E. classes foundations for a lifetime of physical fitness learning and development?

Just off the top of my head, here’s what I’d like to see if I were designing a physical education curriculum for my child. Daily: basic warm-up and aerobic movement, isometric and calisthenic concentric training, sport-movement skills like short distance sprinting, overhand and underhand throwing for distance and accuracy, catching and ball anticipation. Kicking balls on the ground, in the air, straight, with bends, and spin more generally. Flexibility, dynamic and static stretching and yoga. Dance and rhythmic movement. Distance running, interval training. And, absolutely without a doubt, how to safely fall while minimizing injury (break falling). I’d like my child to know the basics of physical fitness as maximizing your range of possibilities in bodily movement over time. And I don’t want kids being forced to just do things. I want them to understand the basic theory of this stuff, the uncontroversial stuff, like how muscles grow in strength and endurance, muscle memory, cardiovascular fitness, oxygen and water, electrolytes, cooling down. I’d imagine this is all a part of P.E. teacher education 101, why isn’t it part of of P.E. also?

I’m no gym rat or fitness buff. People who seem to know all kinds of arcane details about optimizing training and performance for various purposes and contexts should chime in and talk about the best ways to run a curriculum for kids with a variety of fitness levels, especially a curriculum that doesn’t ostracize and make kids feel worse about themselves, removing their motivation. There are fat kids, fit kids, small kids, tall kids. Some excel at physical team play like basketball, some need non-contact or individualized sport like track and field. And student athletes and otherwise athletic students will have a lot of differing needs. But just like with other kinds of education, can we talk about a good baseline curriculum and training regiment that apply to all 5th-11th graders? We have no problem coming up with these things for math, history, and literature. If I was paying for a daily physical education class for 50 minutes for years as an adult, you’d better believe I’d expect more than just a ball and being told to go play with my friends.

Generalizing from physical education to overall philosophy of education, I think we have one answer to what a central goal of education ought to be whether it is physical, intellectual, or manual. Education may be about citizenship, vocation, and socialization, but it is also about fitness. Fitness doesn’t just apply to the body. Intellectual health and fitness is a real thing, so is manual health. People who are incapable of reasoning their way to figuring out the length of a ramp they need to build to go up an incline, or how they would test an hypothesis about whether a drug treatment has an effect or side effect on a disease, or who are simply incapable of cutting a piece of wood, tree branch, or drive a nail or screw straight to join two pieces of material are lacking in fitness. It is not an just intellectual or manual deficit. Physical health and fitness are about a body’s disposition to operate in a certain way under familiar, novel, and variably challenging circumstances. It is about adaptive dispositions. I am horribly unfit to perform an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course, and very somewhat but not optimally fit to run a 5K at the moment. So I know I’m not as fit as I can be, but part of my life is about knowing and understanding where my fitness levels are relative to other things and to be able to know what it would take to be fitter on various dimensions. I don’t train American Ninja Warrior because I can’t fit that into my work and family life. People probably don’t remember their Calculus I for analogous reasons. But any training and knowledge your body has in upper body concentric strength means you are fitter for some tasks, or know how to act and your bodily limits when confronted with a circumstance requiring such a task, like pulling yourself up and over a wall. Having taken Calculus 1, you are disposed to encounter a situation in which those concepts are needed better than someone who never took it. For instance, you are likelier the understand the difference between the rising prices of eggs and the falling inflation rate on eggs.

Intellectual fitness is about the same thing as physical fitness. Intellectual specialists, whether it is in medical billing, logistic chains in agricultural exports, or Victorian British literature are like specialized athletes. Education in the public schools should be the foundation of all of that, physical or otherwise. Every sport requires specialized fitness, but what every athlete has is a strong foundation in the basics.

State departments of education who write out required curriculum, and university systems that write requirements for high school students by having acceptance criteria, make very conscious efforts at determining what makes for their basics of intellectual fitness. We all have opinions about how well we think our public schools are teaching to those things. I think we should hold our physical education in those schools to at least these standards. I’m not talking about the necessity of competitive, rough and tumble sports toughening up our kids. For all I care, all of this could be done with universal dance instruction. In fact, if push came to shove, I’d say that dance is probably the one form of physical education that is most comprehensive, but the nerds and jocks would protest too much. I’m talking about the physical educational equivalent of mathematical, scientific, verbal, and linguistic literacy.

So there’s my polemic about physical education. Its probably too late for my own child. Like many other bourgeois people, she’ll probably end up finding her path through extra-curriculars and eventually, gym memberships and trainers. But it is a shame because one teacher has them daily for five years and its a huge waste if something doesn’t come out of such a class.