Maggie's Farm

My biggest complaint about my son's public school is that it ignores physical fitness training.

Sure, there're the seasonal pageants of sports. The kids muddle through them, and they get oodles of shiny awards and ribbons to show for their "participation." We have drawers full of them, going back to second and third grades.

But white fourth-place ribbons make a flimsy hide for academic failure: As with all things in academe, the hard work of teaching physical fitness is blunted by today's "only if it feels good" therapeutic society.

For instance, the kids can never be taught how to stretch properly. Since it is pain that tells a child when he's reached the limit of any tendon's stretch (because it h-u-r-t-s), then, by definition, any practical instructor in physical education risks being accused of "abusing" children whenever she practices the basics of physical therapy - stretching, that is, on any one of America's tens of millions of atrophied urban children.

And believe me, the kids marinading in these schools (and watching the news) have learned to be quick to complain about any and all "pain" to parents, guardians, and whoever they think might listen.

Same goes with aerobic fitness and endurance training. If their aerobic fitness needs work (and most of our tech-addicted, cage-raised, doughy-riff boys-and-girls' do), our government schools can never push the children to experience the pain and subsequent improvement that accompanies long periods of exercise - and that is REQUIRED to improve students physical condition.

No, to administer pain, in any form, be it emotional pain (such as that transmitted by a dull stare, a bad grade, or other 'microaggression') or physical pain (like the "OH God, I'm gonna die!" pain that precedes the 'second wind' phase of the body's reaction to prolonged exercise) to their captive wards is strictly verboten in today's government schools.

To close, much of what ails young people today, like social media addiction, laziness, bad posture and eating habits, hidden congenital maladies, and lack of enterprise, would have been cured by testing their physical fitness and social skills under the duress of endurance training in grade schools.

Sadly, as the rules are written for America's campus Commisars today, if you're looking to our government campuses to provide real education, I'm afraid you're looking in the wrong place.