An Alternative to High School Athletics: High School Physical Fitness

In the early twenty-first century American high school, athletic programs continue to attract large numbers of students. But what about students who don’t participate in team or individual sports?

In many high schools, the student body is divided into those who are part of a sports program, and those who aren’t.

Students who aren’t part of a school’s athletic system are still in need of exercise. But there are very few avenues for physical fitness apart from sports teams.

Many high schools have reduced the number of required semesters of physical education or gym class.

If organizations outside the school could coordinate with schools, there might be an opportunity to encourage bicycling, hiking, canoeing, etc., for high school students.

This need is all the more pressing inasmuch as a significant demographic segment of teenagers spends much, or even most, of its time interacting with some electronic device. Sedentary lifestyles are leading to obesity and diabetes among an increasing number of teenagers.

Athletic programs seem to persist through good times and bad, because there is a consistent desire for them. Physical fitness programs may require more intentional encouragement from adults.

Resources directed away from high school athletic departments would not endanger sports programs, because such programs always find a way to continue.

Such resources could be directed toward physical fitness initiatives, which often tend to be less expensive, because they do not require stadiums, arenas, or much specialized equipment or coaching staff.

Communities might be well-advised to spend less effort on high school sports and high school athletics, and more effort on high school physical fitness.

A Symptom, Not the Underlying Cause: Common Core Isn’t the Problem

Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, there was debate about an educational initiative known as Common Core.

The debate was and remains fierce, with some passionately opposed, and others enthusiastically supporting. State legislatures accepted, rejected, or proposed compromise modifications of Common Core.

But whichever side one takes in the discussion about Common Core, it’s possible that citizens are missing the real point. Common Core is merely one example of a larger phenomenon.

People might be focusing on a tree but not seeing the forest.

There is and has been a plentiful supply of educational initiatives: Outcome-Based Education, New Math, Every Child Counts, No Child Left Behind, Authentic Assessment, Mastery Learning, Inquiry-Based Education, Purpose-Centered Education, Saxon Math, Small Schools Movement, Standards-Based Education, Student-Centered Learning, and many more.

Each of these, and the countless others which could be added to the list, contains a few nuggets of wisdom buried in a large amount of nonsense.

The problem isn’t Common Core. The problem is the tidal wave of programs and trends which regularly deluge public, and sometimes private, schools.

These schemes can, and should, all be dismissed out-of-hand. Why?

The problems with such strategies are at least twofold: first, they are formulated at the national level; second, they involve the legislative and executive branches of the federal and state governments.

Any nationwide proposal necessarily neglects the local variables. Schools are organized best when they are organized locally. Each city, town, or county has its own unique character, and effective education must pay attention to the features which constitute that spirit.

There will be significant shortcomings in any educational plan which was created by, or processed through, either the legislative branch or the executive branch. Education is best done apart from the government.

The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789, as well as the Land Ordinance of 1785, provided for public education, but did not presume to direct the nature of that education. The shaping of the school was left to the local community, and out of the hands of state and federal governments.

While it is certainly a fine intellectual exercise to analyze various educational proposals, it’s important not to get too caught up in the advantages and disadvantages of any one plan. Any initiative that’s a product of the political process, and any initiative which claims to be a nationwide solution, is a priori wrong.

Concerning the Common Core program in particular, a report from Mercury Radio Arts states:

Stanford professor emeritus James Milgram was the only mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, and he refused to sign off on the proposed standards because he believed they were too weak. In testimony to the Texas legislature, Milgram explained that the standards were “in large measure a political document that … is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

Local, not national, efforts offer the best results in the global educational competition. To be sure, education is a competition, on both national and international levels.

If each town, city, or country has the opportunity to explore its own academic programs, then many different initiatives can be simultaneously explored.

One of Milgram’s objections was that the standards instruct schools to not teach algebra until ninth grade. Milgram and other math experts note that saving algebra until high school means that students won’t be introduced to precalculus until college (assuming they even choose that route).

One perennial concern which reappears in these discussions is that America might be sending too many students to college. Which percentage of high school graduates needs a four-year degree? Are we producing too many university diplomas?

Meanwhile, we might have too few skilled workers in those fields which don’t require four-year degrees. Welders, tool and die makers, draftsmen, etc., are in short supply, and despite our transition to an information economy, are still needed.

This does not come as a surprise to those who put Common Core together. Jason Zimba, a professor at Bennington College and the lead writer of the math standards, acknowledged as much to the (Baton Rouge) Advocate. “If you want to take calculus your freshman year in college, you will need to take more mathematics than is in the Common Core,” he said. Zimba also admitted that students following Common Core would likely be precluded from “attending elite colleges” since the Core is “not aligned with the expectations at the collegiate level.”

Each city, town, and county should wrestle through these questions for itself, and ignore national and political proposals. Indeed, there should be no national or political proposals.

How can we bring an end to ceaseless production of such schemes? Perhaps the simplest answer would be to give them no attention: no media time, no public debate. Ignore educational theorists. Starve bad ideas by giving them no consideration.