James Sallis and Thomas McKenzie (1991) present two main goals of physical education: to “prepare children and youth for a lifetime of physical activity” and to “engage them in physical activity during physical education.” While the second goal is quite easy to achieve, there are more challenges when it comes to the first.
According to 2019 statistics from the WHO, 92.8% of Filipino boys and 94.1% of Filipino girls were “insufficiently physically active,” ranking them first and second in their respective demographics globally (Yee, 2019). There seems to be a disconnect between goal and outcome. Evidently, there is a problem that must be resolved in the way physical education is done.
One alternative is to focus more heavily on physical education than on learning certain sports. This is not to say that learning how to play different sports is bad. It allows students to have fun and exercise at the same time, gives exposure to different sports, and provides opportunities for potential athletes to be spotted. However, the problem with sports is that they often involve other people, and if not other people, equipment or certain provisions such as bikes and space for biking or a pool for swimming, which are not accessible for all students.
A shift in focus could take the form of students learning about different kinds of exercises and how they affect the body first before they put them into practice. A more holistic approach, such as the inclusion of basic nutrition in the curriculum, would also serve the goals of physical education. Sports can and should be a part of PE for the aforementioned reasons, but room must be made for other competencies as well.
Making such adjustments to our PE curriculum would fulfill its goal of “[preparing] children and youth for a lifetime of physical activity.” Knowing different kinds of exercises (e.g. high-intensity interval training, strength training, and cardio) and how to perform them would equip students to practice physical activities that they can feasibly carry out by themselves. Learning about the benefits of each exercise and how to create exercise plans or programs with these will set students up for self-motivated physical exercise in the future, which would benefit their health and overall well-being. A basal level of competence is necessary in order to do certain things. You can’t exercise well if you don’t know how to exercise well.
Students may also become more motivated to exercise this way because of what Kevin Eikenberry calls the confidence/competence loop. As one becomes more competent, one gains confidence, and that confidence pushes one to become even more competent. When students are able to see that they can do exercise, they become more confident, and this confidence in their abilities propels them to keep doing what they are doing.
Abney (n.d.), in the United States Sports Academy’s Sports Digest, affirms this, saying, “A client’s perceived competence in physical activity affects self-efficacy. If a client sees that success is easier to obtain because mastery of a skill is imminent or attained, there is a better chance of the client reaching a maintenance level of physical activity.”
Even in the event that a student does not retain these competencies and is not motivated to continue being physically active, they will at least be able to meet the goal of “[engaging] in physical activity during physical education.” They may possibly have more time engaging in physical activity than in the status quo because, for some sports, facilities are limited, so not everyone gets to play at the same time. These other forms of exercise can more easily be performed by an entire class simultaneously.
As in all other fields of education, it is important for what is being taught in PE to correlate to applicable competencies. This proposed shift in focus is far from the only way we can better our physical education, but, hopefully, it sparks a necessary discussion about the goals of our institutions. What are these for?, What are they currently doing?, and What can we do to make them more effective?
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