Dr. Thom McKenzie explains why it’s so important for children to have quality Physical Education in school and how caring adults can support it. Designed especially for parents, teachers, school board members and administrators.
2 thoughts on “Why We Need Physical Education”
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Mental Flowers 
Great video. It’s not necessarily Physical Education as a block of time in the day at school students need, but rather active lifestyle education and options to be physical throughout the day. We all too often want to have “organized” play time, but much of what children and young adults need is an unorganized time to be kids.
I don’t know if funding for PE, Arts, Music and other programs is best being spent in the school system itself. It might be better to partner with local companies or organizations around town that specialize in a certain program and have after/during school enrichment type programs with them. I don’t see tax dollars increasing all of the sudden for these programs so we might look around the world and see how they structure their educational system.
Lastly, we must look at how our environments are built. If children have to be bussed or driven to school they miss 15-30 minutes per day when they could be walking/biking. Also, if our parks and greenspace is built on the edge of town it doesn’t make it reasonable for kids to gather and play unsupervised. This ties in with providing more possibilities of unstructured play time that kids so desperately need. Our suburbs have offered “safe” and mostly sterile environments, but they fail to meet a healthy standard of living.
Thanks Erik. Well said. I definitely agree that kids need free, unstructured playtime. However, I sadly feel that since many kids haven’t really been raised on play, they do need a “refresher course” on how to play, and how to play safely within their limits, or something like education on how to live an active lifestyle that you mentioned.