Let Students Exercise Options First Things First Mandated Pe Typifies Mixed-Up Priorities

Imagine you’re a freshman in high school. You have four years, six classes per semester, to acquire numerous skills essential to your future.

Who knows best what you ought to study? You? Teachers and parents who know you? Or a pack of politicians who don’t?

Government has imposed graduation requirements for years, and there are good reasons for doing so.

But some mandates make more sense than others. And the mandate for physical education makes the least sense of all. You can force kids at a self-conscious age to endure showers and shower-room hi-jinks, you can force them to wear geeky PE shorts and play team sports that they might never choose for themselves and you might even be able to force them to do enough push-ups to get in shape for a few months. But you can’t make them like it. Fact is: If you force teenagers to do something they detest, you create a real likelihood that they will detest it for life.

There are plenty of opportunities, at school and outside it, for young people to engage voluntarily in the sports they prefer.

The government mandate for a miscellaneous PE class is the worst possible way to create a lifelong affection for exercise. Schools can better address the physical-fitness needs of students by offering and promoting a diverse array of extracurricular intramural sports.

Meanwhile, the PE requirement creates schedule conflicts for students, whose primary goal is academic and vocational development.

The world young people will enter is getting more complicated and competitive, not less. They need to learn more to enter it, not less. The global economy requires greater competence in foreign languages. Computer skill has become a new “basic.”

Wise high school students also know they must study English, history, science, math, geography, fine arts, business, economics and health, plus specific trades for the majority who won’t complete college. Many of these subjects require years of study because the skills and knowledge are acquired in a progression.

There also has to be room in the curriculum for electives so students can pursue their talents. Therefore, every government curriculum mandate ought to be scrutinized. And the first one that ought to be bumped from the list is PE.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see headline: Student body needs toning

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