I Never Don’t Cry At The Bar

Track and field club taught all new runners how to properly warm up, stretch, pace, etc. Its a process, and doing it properly takes 15-20 minutes to make sure your body is ready so you dont hurt yourself.

PE didnt do jack shit, they just said "go run a mile" so 70% of the fucking kids sprinted flat out the first lap and basically walked the other 3. Multiple people did it in boots or tennis shoes. I'm amazed more of them didnt pull a muscle or worse in the process.

most of the prominently nightmarish features of PE, such as running the mile or doing sit-ups, originate with the Presidential Fitness Test. This test, which president Eisenhower implemented in schools in 1956, was created after a different fitness test (the Kraus-Weber test) revealed that Americans were less fit than Europeans -- specifically the Swiss.

The difference between the Kraus-Weber test and the Presidential Fitness test is that the Presidential Fitness test was specifically designed to test military fitness. While the Kraus-Weber test measured total fitness by testing things like core strength and flexibility, the Presidential Fitness test doesn't really make much sense in the context of ordinary fitness -- only in the context of military fitness. Do you remember being tested on how far you could throw a softball? That test mimicked throwing grenades. And it's pretty easy to see why Eisenhower went this direction. In 1956, the Cold War was in full swing and WWII was barely in the rear-view mirror. There was a real possibility that we would be at war with parts of super-fit Europe in the near future. Eisenhower wanted the nation's children ready to fight in that war.

The main issue with the Presidential Fitness test is that, as pointed out above, it really doesn't teach kids how to stay fit or incorporate physical activity in their day-to-day lives. A soldier at war might need to run a mile with no warm-up, or perform a pull-up, but for the average middle-schooler? The tests were just kind of...pointless exercises in misery. You're only really good at the Presidential Fitness Test if you've been practicing the specific exercises tested. And what 12 year old child is doing pull-ups for fun and pleasure? So instead of inspiring America's children to train themselves into a super-fit army, it just humiliated kids who didn't perform well.

There's been a recent push for PE classes to focus more on life-long fitness (things like actually teaching kids to warm up, exposing them to different types of physical activity, etc). Unfortunately, the Presidential Fitness test has already done its damage. It continued to be used in schools until 2013. That's 60 years of teaching kids to associate physical activity with shame and dread. The idea of military PE classes is pretty much baked into our cultural memory, giving us all a background dread of physical activity. and guess what, eisinhower?? that's just going to make people less likely to be physically active!! Maybe if we're trying to emulate the fitness of the SWISS, we shouldn't have gone with MILITARY TRAINING FOR CHILDREN!!

THE INFANT SYSTEM,

FOR

DEVELOPING THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL POWERS OF ALL CHILDREN,

FROM ONE TO SEVEN YEARS OF AGE

BY SAMUEL WILDERSPIN, INVENTOR OF THE SYSTEM OF INFANT TRAINING

You can read about the author over here on wikipedia

Mr. Wilderspin had a vision for holistic children's education that was so far ahead of its time in some ways it still blows some modern ideas out of the fucking water.

He's credited with the invention of the playground, one of the people to come up with the idea of "picture books", and created many childrens toys including a proto version of that thing where you get to slide wooden beads along colourful wires and for that I owe him my life.

In his vision for schools, physical education was integrated into the entire day, through play. His schools that he ran had integrated indoor maypole swings, which were fun rewards to break up periods of intense concentration. They had integrated gardens in the play yards, and little museums with samples of different kinds of flora and fauna. His ideas for teaching geography included basically a tabletop game, and giant mats with scale to teach kids the practical difference in distances.

He also understood that a sudden education gap between children and their parents could lead to confusion, rejection, and anger from parents thinking that their child was making fun of them or being taught useless words for things they already know - risking them being pulled out of school - so he would go talk to parents and educate them as well.

One of the things he specifically warned against in this book was the separation of physical education into a specific block with arbitrary requirements, as he was a person who cared deeply about child welfare (in a very very very christian way but he was again: actively working on preventing abuse and reducing rates of child mortality and repeated child imprisonment), specifically BECAUSE it would traumatize children and make them hate exercise.

He focused on sensory play, in integrating running around into counting lessons and such. If I had gone to a school like the ones he designed, I would have been thrilled beyond measure. A lot of his ideas were eroded away over time, but I want to just share this very important note from him at the end of the book, after he'd written a prayer for the safety and wellbeing of children and for the spread of the system he'd come up with: "This prayer written more than thirty years ago. The reader will see a great portion of the prayer has been answered; the subject has been mooted in Parliament; the Government have mooted the question of Education; and even the sovereign has recommended attention to it in a speech from the throne. This feeling only wants a right direction given to it, and all will be well."

Things can be different again. We've learned so much more about how people learn and grow over time since Mr. Wilderspin's time in 1844.

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

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