Not Even Part of the Conversation

At this year’s start-of-school orientation, an energetic parent approached the counselors at the school where I work, eager to have one of her most pressing academic questions answered: “How can my daughter be excused from PE?”

As a PE teacher myself, sitting within earshot, perhaps you’d expect me to be offended or defensive. I wasn’t. I absolutely understand her instincts.

Most high school PE is full of truly random team-sports units, grades based on “participation” (read: compliance), and exceedingly low expectations for fitness and performance. In other words, a class a capable kid who’s already involved in sports elsewhere can absolutely skip.

Even assuming fitness is enough of a societal priority that physical movement should remain a mandatory part of the day, the current model of physical education is clearly broken: if it’s intended to impact societal health, over the past 40-or-so years Americans’ health has only gotten worse.

The good news is that kids have unique interests, and there’s no shortage of exciting ways to accommodate them. From youth soccer to skating to boutique climbing gyms, students can pursue movement and social opportunities in ways that are engaging and challenging. The arguments in favor of generic, game-centric PE - get kids moving, introduce teamwork concepts, teach basic skills and movements - can easily be accomplished after school in pursuits of families’ and kids’ own liking, but to much greater effect in settings that cater to students’ unique needs and personalities. In fact, I want my own children to grow into physically-capable adults, and the best way to do that is A) give them choice in their own endeavors, such that they learn to love physical activity and B) engage them in activities that actually produce systematic changes in physical strength and capacity. Legacy PE often does neither.

In extracurricular activities, families can control their children’s athletic experiences. Parents can select the clubs and programs that fit with their child’s curiosity and aptitudes, broad or narrow. Families can also choose the schedule that best matches their child’s goals: a soccer-obsessed pre-teen might benefit from a competitive club team, whereas a kid who surfs or skis on the weekends might choose a less-demanding sports program during the week for a social aspect that augments their more genuine independent interests. And so on.

Perhaps most importantly, parents who prioritize after-school sports can also control for their children’s coaches and mentors by choosing teams or programs based on reputation or personal past experience. On the other hand, a motivated student-athlete may be assigned to a public school PE class featuring an unmotivated teacher who simply rolls out the balls in PE for de-facto free play – and that adult essentially cannot be removed by administrators, thanks to the strength of the teachers unions.

Modern physical education curriculums are similarly a you-get-what-you-get proposition. In PE, a student who plays competitive field hockey and wants to work on agility or coordination may be relegated to a game of kickball amounting to not much more than a few moments of exercise or skill work spread across an entire class period. A student who despises team sports but excels in individual pursuits might be made to stand on the basketball court for long stretches as he tries to avoid having the ball passed to him in a game that scares or embarrasses him.

The response to this, across the country, is an entire social class of parents and kids who suffer through PE as an unpalatable-but-unavoidable part of public schooling on their way toward authentically rewarding individual athletic pursuits once the school day ends. That’s why the most capable, athletic kids on a given campus are often also the most apathetic in between the bells of a PE class - they have far superior athletic outlets elsewhere in their lives, and can often get A’s in PE while exerting next to zero legitimate effort anyway.

If every student was enrolled in an after-school sport or physical pursuit, we could just eliminate high school PE altogether, save a ton of headaches and money, and leave it at that. But that’s not the case, so in the interest of fairness, perhaps it’s possible that I’m mischaracterizing the core argument in favor of physical education. Perhaps PE was never meant to match after-school offerings in terms of quality, and was instead meant to cater to the less privileged students who’d otherwise get little or no activity in a given day. In other words, perhaps PE is just a blunt instrument meant to give the sedentary class of Americans a little exercise. The privileged/already-active students, this argument goes, get a little extra movement in their day and just have to deal with the rest of the effects of the lowest-common-denominator approaches to fitness as a tradeoff for the benefit to others.

The Atlantic recently argued that another core function school is just to provide daycare, and that too much time with their kids could lead parents toward antidepressants and alcohol; maybe, that argument goes, that’s really where our focus should be - keeping kids from turning their (well-meaning) parents into alcoholics and drug addicts. The extension of this argument is that legacy PE keeps kids at least nominally tamer by providing some basic physical outlet.

But is this really how low we want to set the bar? Going further, on behalf of students without parents who can afford club sports - is this really the best we can do for them?

Here’s another question: if in your defense of physical education you could replace “PE” with “recess” and end up with the same argument – that is, that any physical activity is good for us, so we should do it, even if it’s random and unstructured – then physical education as a course is indefensible. We could replace physical education teachers with recess monitors and save taxpayers millions. (Let me preemptively cut off the “credentialism” argument right here - most teaching credentials do not actually test or require any relevant physical education knowledge beyond what any moderately-motivated individual could pick up on YouTube.)

And returning to the kids who are disinterested in sports by the ninth grade – the kids the engaged athletes apparently must simply tolerate as classmates for the greater societal good – those disinterested students have probably opted out for a pretty simple reason: they don’t like sports! Nine years of public school PE hasn’t convinced them to like sports - a tenth or eleventh year isn’t going to magically fix things.

Imagine millions of families resigned the fact that their children will be assigned to 11 pointless years of math classes, but that they’ll make up for the inadequate instruction with hundreds of hours - and countless thousands of dollars - in private teaching (coaching). We’d never accept it.

Put another way: If you’re a high school PE teacher, intelligent adults outside your immediate sphere probably do not even consider you when thinking through teenagers’ physical development: They’re too busy driving those children to practices in which coaches have sketched out a scaled, periodized and measurable approach to strength gains, improvements in muscular and aerobic endurance, and engagement based on individual motivations.

Put even more bluntly: If you’re a high school PE teacher, what is your job?

It’s no wonder so many of you are just killing time during the day in order to get to your athletics teams.

But there’s a better way, and the solution to the innumerate problems with legacy PE is refreshingly simple: eliminate games-based curriculums for teenagers and replace them with a relentless emphasis on systematic strength and conditioning. Every child in this model benefits, which might be the most radical gift to both students and teachers hiding in plain sight in American education today.

Invest in weight rooms, send coaches to courses like USA Weightlifting’s Level 1 class, write several periodized programs for students in various stages of physical development and/or season of sport, and forget about the doldrums of third period slow-pitch softball forever.

Students who have learned to despise sports can put in their AirPods and get in some work toward aesthetic or long-term health goals. Students who play high-level club soccer can knock out some snappy power snatches before practice. Students who employ private strength coaches on afternoons and weekends can get a few reps in on a lift they’ve learned and can now practice during the school day. Students who lack social outlets elsewhere can form little lifting groups and post progress videos to Instagram (or whatever). And all of these students’ individual goals can be accommodated between bells in a single class.

Unlike basketball or soccer, where a varsity athlete and a novice really cannot benefit in the same way from the same class game, the student struggling to squat 20 kilos is encountering the exact same challenge as the student working on squatting 200. Lifting weights is the great unifier.

At my school, we’ve largely scrapped lackluster basketball units for weight room sessions and CrossFit-style workouts. We have three lifting spaces on campus: a traditional weight room, a converted classroom with squat racks stacked back-to-back to maximize space, and a storage container full of bumpers and bars. With classes of up to 50 kids, we could have 150 kids at any given moment learning fun, challenging, compound lifts that will serve them well for the rest of their lives. The results have been astounding.

Every high school student will benefit from a little more knowledge of physiology, a little more comfort around barbells and kettlebells, a little more strength and resilience. The same can’t be said for half-hearted participation in a kickball unit.

It’s not the worst guiding principle for educators: write a curriculum that demands the attention of the smartest parents at your site. Become part of the conversation.