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Physical Education in the 21st Century
Steve Jefferies

(This commentary originally appeared in the Ellensburg Daily Record and WAHPERD Journal. It was written to inform the public of some of the changes that have occurred in today's physical education, and also to justify the need for school physical education.)
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Although the name remains, physical education in schools and colleges has a new goal: to promote active and healthy lifestyles. Data is clear; obesity already at alarming proportions among American adults is now affecting young people at a rate the US Surgeon General characterizes as epidemic. Overweight and out of shape young people face increasing risks of cardiovascular related diseases, including elevated cholesterol, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes mellitus, as well as an increased risk of cancer and other diseases. These life threatening conditions cast irrelevance over one's intellectual or creative potential. Left ignored, spiraling health care costs over the next half-century will trivialize today's already alarming figures.

In the past, school physical education was something you either loved or loathed. Something you couldn't wait to run to or run from. For the physically adept, physical education experiences successfully motivated a love of physical activity. For the physically challenged, especially if it meant squeezing an oversized body into skimpy shorts and a tummy hugging t-shirt, "gym" was the turn off that convinced adolescents to avoid sampling any future forms of physical activity.

For years, physical education suffered the bad rap of being confused as an extension of athletics, a sort of athletic-appetizer whose main purpose was to nurture talent for competitive teams. The fact that most of the coaches happened to also teach physical education confirmed this belief. Neither remains true. Young children need to master fundamental movement skills if they are to become physically confident adults. Being ridiculed as "throwing like a girl" in reality charactizes the common failure of boys and girls alike to master proper throwing fundamentals. Children allowed to fail this and similar basic movement skills can never hope to be successful in organized sports or recreational activities. Becoming physically competent is a prerequisite for an active and healthy lifestyle

Once young people develop physical competence the physical educators' mission shifts toward guiding students into activities that will become self-motivating. Forcing fitness on people never really worked - they just quit when coercion ceased. Modern-day physical educators strive to stimulate people towards activities that will be pursued for fun but have fitness as an outcome. As with most educational experiences, the real measure of a successful physical education class is whether or not participants continue afterwards to value physical activity and see its relevance to their future well-being.

For young children, teens, and adults, in public schools and colleges, today's physical educators share a vision of graduating "physically educated people:" people who are physically skillful and fit, regularly participate in activity, and know and value the contribution of physical activity to a healthy lifestyle. So in this era of time crunches and increased academic pressure, amid the personal and institutional tendencies to sacrifice physical education classes in the name of academics, consider carefully the consequences when considering omitting physical education from your children's or your own daily schedule. Need more? Here are five turn on's for including physical education in our 21st century academic programs:

1. Preventing Happy Puppies From Becoming Old Dogs.
Some time take a walk next to your nearest elementary school and observe the ceaseless motion of young children. Unfortunately, the joy of movement that comes so naturally in childhood is slowly but inextricably weaned out of us through the daylong imposition of sedentary instruction in traditional academic education. Slender, flexible, and healthy bodies are slowly transformed into impassive organisms increasingly attuned to inactive lifestyles. These old dogs will increasingly face many debilitating chronic yet preventable illnesses.

2. Movement Is Fundamental In Learning.
Well established long ago by child development specialists such as Piaget is that the fact that young people learn much about their world through movement. Much of this is unstructured and involves interaction with both the physical and social environment. Through movement we learn about the capabilities of our bodies and our relationship with others. The knowledge necessary to become a productive member of society depends on more than facts and figures, words and numbers. Humans learn to move, and move to learn.

3. Playful People Survive.
From the dawn of time, playful people were the fittest, not merely in a physical sense but because their playful creativity gave them the capacity to adapt to change. It is no less true today that success in adult life demands flexibility and a willingness to think differently. Those who resist change do so at their peril and risk discovering too late lost opportunities. Successful people are playful people and physical play is an essential element in stimulating creative thought.

4. Living And Working Productively.
Buried by the hype of the financial rewards possible to adults willing to dedicate most of their waking hours to their jobs, is alarming evidence (substantiated by the less scientific support of common sense) that people who ignore their health (physical, social and emotional) rarely sustain their productivity over the long term. Brains simply do not function well in sick bodies!

5. Balancing Work And Play.
An appreciation for and adeptness in movement oriented activities helps to maintain physical health but perhaps just as importantly establishes the foundation for non-work related leisure activities. Adults who don't see the relationship between movement and sustaining good health are unlikely to exercise on any regular basis. Similarly, adults who lack movement skills find little pleasure in engaging in physical activities. Physical competence is worth striving for, not simply for games playing prowess, but as a foundation for life outside of work and the productive use of recreational time.

(Dr. Steve Jefferies is the Director of Physical Education and Coaching Education at CWU. He also serves on the Ellensburg School District School Board.)