A healthy mind in a healthy body… not going to happen as a result of school sports.
Games involving the pursuit of a ball on a cold wet field are absolutely pointless and stupid.
The sheer awfulness of physical education in the UK must be a major contributor to the lack of exercise of many people.
I hated school sports. I have no hand-eye co-ordination so could not play ball games; I hated the picking of teams because I was always left till last (how humiliating); I was not very fit and already slightly chubby according to some (though I now know that I actually had a healthy BMI). I hated the competitive atmosphere, and the gendering of sport, and the way the bullies picked on me and my friends for being crap at sport, and were allowed to get away with it. We didn’t bully them for being crap at academic subjects. Nowadays, I am told, there is the ritual humiliation of the bleep test, which is inflicted on pupils of physical education, and sounds like a cruel and unusual punishment. I can honestly say that my experience of school sports lessons put me off all sport for decades. Nowadays I do walking, cycling and swimming, but I do not see any of these as “sport”.
I was fortunate in my last but one year at school to have a sports teacher who would not let the bullies be mean to the non-sporty kids. She also let us “go for a run” which usually meant, jog until out of sight and then walk to the sweet shop. Thank you, Mrs Winter.
In my last year at school, there was a scheme where we could go and visit old people instead of doing sports. That was awesome. The old lady we visited was called Ivy and was born in 1896. She remembered when a lot of the houses in the area were built, and the fields that existed before that.
At sixth form college, I got a chance to have a go at archery, which I absolutely loved and still do.
I’d rather go climbing, hiking, swimming, cycling, or do martial arts, archery, quarterstaff practice, or sword fighting. These activities are actually fun and interesting and cool, and might even be useful one day.
When I was a teacher, I would give any kid who asked me a note to get out of sports lessons (and so did several other teachers). Sadly the sports teachers realized what was going on and said they would only accept notes from parents. But it was good while it lasted.
The kids at the school where I taught could probably figure out which teachers hated sports at school and would give them a note.
One of my favourite stories about this sort of thing is the school I heard about where the proper teachers wouldn’t let the sports teachers in their staff room and made them have a separate one.
The virtue that ballgames are supposed to instil in children is teamwork—but actually what they do is drill them into unquestioning obedience, which is not a virtue.
Hiking, climbing, camping, and swimming give you intimacy with Nature, survival skills, and resilience. And genuine teamwork skills, where people confer with each other and negotiate and assign tasks on the basis of people’s skills.
Archery, martial arts, sword fighting, and quarterstaff practice give you self confidence, survival skills, and hand-eye coordination (which ballgames never achieved for me). Martial arts would also help the victims of bullying to defend themselves.
People should be allowed to choose what activities they want to do to keep fit, not forced to do activities that they hate.
“Mens sana in corpore sano” (healthy mind in a healthy body) was the motto of muscular Christianity and the attitudes that got hundreds of soldiers killed in the First World War. Muscular Christianity was also anti-mystical and homophobic, and promoted sport as a Christian activity (which is presumably why school sports became so emphasized in the curriculum).
Dowsing for Divinity 