Students Need Physical Education
* It is discouraging to realize that there are otherwise highly educated people who fail to comprehend the enormous importance of a good physical education program to any school system’s curriculum. Case in point is the letter written by Jolly F. Griggs, a retired Ventura College teacher, which appeared June 7.
Griggs maintains that physical education is a “very expensive sacred cow” which ought to be slaughtered in order to save school district money. In making this statement, Griggs obviously fails to consider the basic composition of human beings. Outstanding educators for centuries have recognized the tripartite composition of humans, e.g., we are mental, physical and spiritual in nature. The chief goal of education is to educate the whole person for an entire lifetime. The ancient Greek philosophers and educators as well as today’s wise thinkers have always understood this and realize that if students are not exposed to learning in all three areas, the result will be an out of balance, incompletely educated human being.
Griggs offers a blanket statement that, “P.E. is no more than a fun-and-games interlude between important studies.” If the physical education teachers are doing their job, there will be fun for the students playing the games in these interludes, but education is also taking place: Students are learning and refining skills in a number of activities, recognizing their physical capabilities as well as their limitations and beginning to understand the crucial and positive relationship between physical activity and a healthy life as they become physically fit.
Physical education is as important as any other body of knowledge to the student’s total education and total well-being. Physical education is a solid and necessary bolster to intellectual fitness. To assume that this is not so is absurd. Physical education belongs in any intelligently constructed school curriculum.
GEORGE S. POOLE
Newbury Park
George S. Poole is director of physical education at Pepperdine University.
