| PE for
Sale: Will Corporate America Replace Public School Physical Education?
For adults, the change probably occurred sometime in the 1970s.
The baby boomer generation was entering the workforce. Most American
families lived in or around cities. Young working adults had more
money and free time than their parents. New technology made work
increasingly sedentary. Working out was becoming trendy. Sports
clubs were scarce, expensive, and inaccessible. And existing gyms
focused mostly on body-building. The boomers' needs to get and stay
in shape were simply not being met.
Corporate America was quick to respond. There was money to be made
in creating a new breed of fitness and health clubs: Places where
middle class working adults could regularly drop in without any
appointment. Facilities that offered a variety of health-promoting
physical activities that adults could learn quickly without being
skilled athletes.
Within a few years, aided greatly by a number of high profile celebrity
entrepreneurs, fitness clubs sprang up in cities and local communities
nationwide. Adult health became a big and highly profitable business.
Fast forward thirty years or so to today. How long will it be before
corporate America repositions itself to address the childhood obesity
epidemic? And, more pertinent to our own profession, is it possible
that private business will someday replace public school physical
education?
Last month while in Great Britain, I watched a show on national
television in which a retired "celebrity" soccer player
was featured tackling children's obesity. Actually, what he did
was to select a small group of overweight and inactive school children
and try to motivate them to enjoy participating in physical activity.
It was a dismal failure, although let's give him credit for at least
recognizing the problem and giving it a shot (Of course the more
cynical might suppose his efforts were mostly intended as a great
story for prime time television.).
This individual - acknowledging a lack of any training in physical
education - was naive enough to believe that if he took these movement-adverse
children into a gym for an hour a week, he could change their activity
behavior. His initial approach was to create an exercise circuit,
then stand on the sidelines shouting encouragement to the kids to
do these pain-provoking physical exertions.
Now it so happens that earlier this summer I purchased a 30lb
scuba weight belt. That's about 20% extra body weight for me. After
carrying this belt around, I’m convinced that anyone who tries
to get overweight kids to do vigorous exercise should first be required
to do the same exercises wearing a scuba weight belt 30 lbs more
than they currently weigh. Since many overweight kids carry much
more than 20% additional body weight, I can only imagine the pain
overweight kids have to endure when forced into vigorous exercise.
Can anyone think of a better way to turn kids off of physical activity?
But I digress. Sure enough the celebrity status of this athlete
faded fast in the kids' eyes. Students began excitedly enough, having
been chosen from a much larger group of exercise wanna-bees. They
clearly recognized their physical limitations, and started motivated
to change.
But of course the approach was all wrong. What chance did 1-hour
a week of exercise with a celebrity instructor have of changing
anything? If these kids had been forced to run for the entire hour
- which most of them could never have done - what difference would
it have made to their weight? The type of activity was wrong, the
frequency and duration of physical activity was insufficient, and
there was no attempt to change the kids' diet.
What I see as a problem is that we typically have similarly overweight
and inactive students in our elementary school PE programs for only
about an hour a week. And in middle and secondary schools the daily
hour of PE rarely occurs across all grades. Simply stated, the obesity
crisis is not gong to be solved by what we do in our school physical
education classes. We simply don't have kids in class long enough
to counter all of the factors contributing to children's obesity.
Kids need to become HABITUAL movers and HABITUALLY healthy eaters.
What can we do? Will the corporate entrepreneurs work out programs
to effectively change kids' activity and dietary habits before us?
From what I saw on British television they obviously haven't got
it right yet. But we can be certain better ideas will come, especially
if there is money to be made. Where then will that leave public
school physical education? Will kids' health clubs replace us? It's
not too soon for all of us to think about how we should be responding
to the obesity crisis, and to reflect upon what a quality public
school physical education should look like in the 21st century.
Got a comment on this editorial? Give your opinion in
the forum.
Steve Jefferies, pelinks4u publisher
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