Fitness standards for children are needed
‘We test for everything else, why not this when the benefits are so clear?’
The Royal Army Physical Training Corps has a motto: ‘Mens sana in corpore sano’. It is commonly translated as ‘fit in body, fit in mind’ or more accurately ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. The gist of the saying is, essentially, that exercise makes you mentally healthy, and it just so happens that all the science supports this view.
Another man who took a similar view to this was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When he was elected president in 1961 one of his concerns was the ill health of the American people, and, admittedly, the ability of the American youth to fight in an upcoming war. Considering that today the US military views obesity as the greatest threat to national security, it's clear that this problem has only gotten worse since Kennedy's era, mostly due to the abandonment of his rather impressive fitness program by American high schools.
Physical education in the English speaking world, like most education, is a joke. But modern physical education is king of the jokes, a shining beacon of incompetence so bright it might as well be the sun, and the health and mental fortitude of teenagers everywhere has suffered for it. Good physical education can really do wonders for both the body and the mind and, if implemented properly, could solve the obesity crisis.
What other solutions are there? Making fizzy drinks slightly more expensive or wheeling out Jamie Oliver to play ten minutes of quick cricket is hardly a solution, in fact it smacks of laziness; a way to pretend to be doing something about the problem while doing nothing at all.
Children need to be taught self-discipline, they need to be made fit and strong and the best way of doing that is not to take half measures but to introduce a comprehensive fitness program with standards that push children to be the best they can be. We should learn from the success of Kennedy’s program and the failures caused by its abandonment.
Although I am not suggesting introducing a program quite as tough as La Sierra High School’s, but at the very least national physical standards should be set for children in every year of high school that have to be passed. We test for everything else, why not this when its benefits are so clear? To do anything else is to fail the next generation more than we already have.
