The New Physical Education
One high-school subject stands out above all others in my memory: Physical Education. I detested everything about PE, from the endless runs around a large undeveloped property near my high-school to Friday afternoons in the gym where we played "murder-ball", our own sadistic version of dodge ball.
I quickly learned that if I kept a low profile, and was discreet in minimizing my participation, I could still get by with a grade of "B", or at worst a "C'. During the outdoor runs, I would disappear for a few rounds into a shallow ditch behind a row of hedges, out of sight of the gym teachers. My murder-ball strategy was to pretend I was hit early in the game when there were still so many players in the game that nobody noticed.
For me, PE seemed a boring and unpleasant waste of my time. So when a recent National Public Broadcasting program about the "New Physical Education" movement was broadcast recently, I listened with great interest.
The first part of the program described one important aspect of the New PE: fewer competitive activities (dodge ball was cited as a prime example) and more activities that emphasize personal achievement such as rock-climbing, kick-boxing and tai-chi.
So far so good, I thought. While rock-climbing and kick-boxing probably would not have appealed to me, I think I would have enjoyed tai-chi, and probably benefited a great deal from it.
But then, in the second part of the program, the whole question of evaluation and measurement was introduced. How are kids in the New PE programs to be graded?
One approach, already in use in one Seattle school, involved attaching tiny heart rate monitors to the children during class. Then, when the class was over, the teacher could check the read outs and determine just how much effort each child had made, and grade accordingly.
So much for minimizing strategies of the sort I had perfected!
But there is a far more serious issue at stake here: This kind of measurement mirrors and reinforces the preoccupation of most adult fitness programs with the quantity of activity performed, rather than the way participants use their bodies while performing those activities. We tend to be interested in how many laps we swam, the amount of weights we lifted, or the speed of our runs rather than how well we used our body in performing those sports. In other words, quantity rather than quality.
To see what this leads to, take a look at any group of runners or joggers. You will probably see tight necks, hunched shoulders and painful expressions on many of their faces. These runners may be getting a cardiovascular workout, but in the process they're putting a lot of unnecessary and harmful pressure on their bodies. No wonder so many people who begin fitness programs drop out after a few weeks, often due to pain or injuries.
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