PE is hell: How to actually get kids enjoying physical activity This is so uncannily similar to my experiences with PE. A very thorough description of all the problems - I’d almost forgotten how awful it was.

It’s such a shame, because learning how to exercise and take care of your body is so important, and PE doesn’t teach that at all. Instead, it’s this frustrating, physically painful, degrading demonstration of discipline. PE doesn’t teach you how to safely push at the edge of your comfort zone in order to effectively develop your ability at something; it teaches you that nobody cares about your comfort.

PE doesn’t teach you how to exercise to keep your body healthy - it teaches you to try to hit a certain level of aptitude at a competitive sport. I agree so much with this writer’s frustration that gymnastics and trampolining were so rare. I loved those lessons because they were about challenging yourself, rather than comparing yourself to others.

Why can’t students choose what kinds of PE activities they want to do? It’s absurd to me that you are allowed to drop history and geography long before you’re allowed to drop football and hockey. Like sure, you lack the information required to be able to vote in your own interests at the ballot box, but at least you know what it’s like to score an own goal in the literal sense.

Maybe the focus on team sports is intended to teach people how to work as a team, but there wasn’t actually any guidance or training on how to achieve effective collaboration. I mostly had to learn that in my twenties, after I’d recovered from the experience of all team work in school being a massive source of anxiety.

Another justification is that as an adult you’ll often have to do things you don’t want to do, so you need to get used to it in PE lessons - but actually, as an adult I have bodily autonomy, and when I have to do things I don’t want to do, it’s because there is an actual reason why that thing needs to be done, it’s not because those are the rules and that’s that.

In a way, this is basic game design - in some technical sense, all these competitive sports are an intrinsic gamification layer on physical education, but they SUCK at motivating people or making education fun. Games are fun when they’re consensual, and they can be truly awful when they’re mandatory. from Facebook via IFTTT