An increasing number of Michigan’s pediatricians are prescribing children drugs like Ozempic to combat the youth obesity crisis. Doctors across the state are reporting seeing more and more children with hypertension, prediabetes, and joints worn down enough to need surgery.
Exercise and nutrition work hand-in-hand to optimize our health. In childhood, we set a course and develop habits that either contribute to our long-term wellness or work against it. So it makes sense that Michigan law requires physical education for every child, K–12, as a condition of graduation. What doesn’t make sense is how poorly this requirement seems to be working.
The state adopted updated PE standards in 2017. Those standards run to dozens of pages of careful language about “physical literacy,” “college and career readiness,” and lifelong fitness. They are similar to standards adopted nationwide and suffer from one of the chief defects of this kind of standard: It’s easy to check the box, but difficult to make a real impact.
The current framework considers successful physical education to be measurable by compliance with standards and documented by credit hours. This is PE as paperwork. Did that 7-year-old successfully throw a ball with the right foot forward? If so, we sign off on the credit and move on. There are lots of games and activities, but the real results show up in the pediatrician’s office.
It looks like we can ensure our students receive physical education “content,” but not that they become physically educated.
This is not a small distinction. You cannot build a coherent PE program with compliance documents any more than you can teach a child to love reading by making him fill out a reading log.
Behind this ineffective approach lurks the question: What is physical education for?
PE is supposed to give children the tools they need to cultivate fitness (the opposite of illness) throughout their lives. Some of those tools are physical, learning movements and developing physical skills, and some of them relate to character, developing fortitude and perseverance. But none of it matters if the students don’t graduate with the habit of taking responsibility for themselves moving forward.
Imagine, if you will, two PE programs. Both take into account the state standards and “check all the boxes.” But one of them is purpose-built to check those boxes. It prioritizes compliance. The state PE standards are a test, and the PE program teaches to the test.
Now consider a program that is purpose-built to give students the knowledge, skill, and habits to cultivate fitness over the course of a lifetime. It satisfies the standards, but only as a side effect of actually being a coherent program for physical fitness and habit development.
Perhaps it seems like a subtle difference, but the shape and tone of these two programs would be fundamentally different. Which dominates the educational landscape in Michigan?
Michigan doesn’t need a new standards document. The 2017 version has inoffensive content. What it needs is a prior question answered honestly: What are we actually trying to do when we send a child to gym class?
If the answer is “meet a graduation requirement,” we will keep producing generations of kids sick enough to need injectable drugs at age 12. If the answer is something more serious—the formation of a person who knows what the body is for and how to use it—then the whole enterprise looks different.
The time, the curriculum, the seriousness: all of it changes. It becomes a program involving top-notch formation for our PE teachers, including a call for them to set the example. It involves a fundamentals-oriented approach to building functional physical capacity. It involves setting goals, measuring performance, providing feedback, and celebrating both progress and excellence. It involves character development so that the physical growth we make is accompanied by the responsibility to carry that growth forward into adulthood and citizenship.
Here’s what this looks like in practice: Benchmarking or fitness testing is a must. You can’t set goals and evaluate progress if you don’t measure fitness levels. PE should incentivize improvement by celebrating excellence and recognizing different levels of ability. In the Iliad Athletics program, we use bronze, silver, and gold to recognize how students have performed on our rigorous benchmarking standards, but you could use anything that encourages students to level up. This is not to make some kids feel bad and only has that effect if poorly implemented. Instead, it offers public recognition of excellence, just like the honor roll in academics.
PE teachers should also use techniques to galvanize student interest and instruct in virtue. In our program, we use tactical decision games, leadership reaction courses, and short virtue lessons called “Tie-ins” to make sure PE is not just physical activity in a vacuum. However you structure yours, the general ingredients involve teams with mixed levels of ability and talent, pressure from time or physical challenges, and some sort of game or competition to drive the action.
Done well, previously uninterested students are taken by surprise by how invested they are in the challenge. All the while, they are giving the teacher valuable insights into their characters which we use to coach, motivate, and encourage them moving forward.
Finally, the programs should focus on functional fitness rather than teaching the rules to various sports. Every class should include a challenging workout with sweat and elevated heartrates. When students graduate from school, their ongoing fitness will not depend on whether they know the rules to team handball (much as I love it), but whether they know how to structure a good hard workout and have the discipline to stick with it.
One in three Michigan kids is overweight. The state has had a mandated gym class their entire lives.
The box has been checked. It didn’t work.
Patrick Whalen, a former Marine, is founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics.
