From a piece originally written in May 2003. I doubt much has changed.
There seems to have been a debate raging in school physical education for many years. In one camp, kids should play competitive sports; they love to do this, and it prepares them for the competitive real world, as well as teaching them sporting values - 'sportsmanship'. The critics say that the less athletic children lose out, which is, to a point, true.
In the other camp, kids play contrived, essentially non-competitive games. Everybody gets and equal turn with the ball. Critics say this is pathetic, and is sheltering kids from the reality of adult life. Also largely true.
I remember when I was a kid, and I'm going back to primary school age here, what would happen whenever a football showed up in the playground. Two kids would put an arm around each other and start walking around each other in a small circle shouting "All join on for FOOT-ball!" repeatedly. As more kids joined both ends of this slowly rotating line it would get bigger and louder, and eventually most of the boys in the playground would have joined on (the girls were segregated in a different area, practicing their incomprehensible dark arts, like 'hopscotch'). At this stage there could be forty kids or more in the line.
Having reached critical mass, the line would stop rotating, and the two original instigators, who were now de facto team captains, would start picking their teams. The process was on the face of it fairly harsh, but no one at all seemed to mind. Captain A would pick a player, then Captain B, and so on until everyone in the line, including the no-hopers who could barely kick a ball, had been allocated to a team. If no goalkeepers volunteered, the 'floating goalie' contingency was invoked, and the game would commence. It would continue until the bell sounded for start of lessons.
It seems to me that the kids had solved at least some of the problems which routinely fox adults. The teams were uniquely well balanced, due to the process of selection. Inclusion was voluntary, not coercive, but absolutely anyone who joined the line would play, without being given a hard time, so most kids enthusiastically joined in irrespective of talent. The game was very definitely competitive, but because the identity of a team evaporated with the bell, the result of each game was largely irrelevant.
Which is kind of interesting, but not really a comprehensive solution to the school PE problem I guess.
I grew up in an era when more-or-less the be all and end all of school PE was sports of some kind. In other words, there was no actual physical education at all. If you were already reasonably good at running or football you did okay, otherwise you hated it, and in either case your learned absolutely nothing sustainable (apart from the mechanics of the sport in question). You did not learn about the paramount importance of taking responsibility for your own physical condition, the satisfaction of improving and developing your own capabilities and the near total irrelevance of comparing those capabilities with someone else's.
The most vital single factor in physical development and personal satisfaction is progression, preferably steady and consistent progress. When I was at school, if a kid could run the four-mile cross country in such-and-such a time, and you couldn't even run it at all, then he could run and you couldn't and that was that. No one told you what I didn't learn until my twenties - that if you can only jog a quarter of a mile without stopping, that's okay as long as you come back tomorrow and add a hundred yards or so. And that after a few years of this you, you useless no-hoper, will be running marathons.
And that this principle applies to virtually everything - running faster, running further, doing lots of press ups, lifting heavy weights. Just about the only important thing that a PE teacher could teach you I was never taught in god knows how many years of schooling.
I hope it's different nowadays. That would be progress.
There seems to have been a debate raging in school physical education for many years. In one camp, kids should play competitive sports; they love to do this, and it prepares them for the competitive real world, as well as teaching them sporting values - 'sportsmanship'. The critics say that the less athletic children lose out, which is, to a point, true.
In the other camp, kids play contrived, essentially non-competitive games. Everybody gets and equal turn with the ball. Critics say this is pathetic, and is sheltering kids from the reality of adult life. Also largely true.
I remember when I was a kid, and I'm going back to primary school age here, what would happen whenever a football showed up in the playground. Two kids would put an arm around each other and start walking around each other in a small circle shouting "All join on for FOOT-ball!" repeatedly. As more kids joined both ends of this slowly rotating line it would get bigger and louder, and eventually most of the boys in the playground would have joined on (the girls were segregated in a different area, practicing their incomprehensible dark arts, like 'hopscotch'). At this stage there could be forty kids or more in the line.
Having reached critical mass, the line would stop rotating, and the two original instigators, who were now de facto team captains, would start picking their teams. The process was on the face of it fairly harsh, but no one at all seemed to mind. Captain A would pick a player, then Captain B, and so on until everyone in the line, including the no-hopers who could barely kick a ball, had been allocated to a team. If no goalkeepers volunteered, the 'floating goalie' contingency was invoked, and the game would commence. It would continue until the bell sounded for start of lessons.
It seems to me that the kids had solved at least some of the problems which routinely fox adults. The teams were uniquely well balanced, due to the process of selection. Inclusion was voluntary, not coercive, but absolutely anyone who joined the line would play, without being given a hard time, so most kids enthusiastically joined in irrespective of talent. The game was very definitely competitive, but because the identity of a team evaporated with the bell, the result of each game was largely irrelevant.
Which is kind of interesting, but not really a comprehensive solution to the school PE problem I guess.
I grew up in an era when more-or-less the be all and end all of school PE was sports of some kind. In other words, there was no actual physical education at all. If you were already reasonably good at running or football you did okay, otherwise you hated it, and in either case your learned absolutely nothing sustainable (apart from the mechanics of the sport in question). You did not learn about the paramount importance of taking responsibility for your own physical condition, the satisfaction of improving and developing your own capabilities and the near total irrelevance of comparing those capabilities with someone else's.
The most vital single factor in physical development and personal satisfaction is progression, preferably steady and consistent progress. When I was at school, if a kid could run the four-mile cross country in such-and-such a time, and you couldn't even run it at all, then he could run and you couldn't and that was that. No one told you what I didn't learn until my twenties - that if you can only jog a quarter of a mile without stopping, that's okay as long as you come back tomorrow and add a hundred yards or so. And that after a few years of this you, you useless no-hoper, will be running marathons.
And that this principle applies to virtually everything - running faster, running further, doing lots of press ups, lifting heavy weights. Just about the only important thing that a PE teacher could teach you I was never taught in god knows how many years of schooling.
I hope it's different nowadays. That would be progress.
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