Do you think exercise should be emphasized in American Schools?

Question

Why?

Answer 1

Well there's already a class devoted to it.

Answer 2

No. Charge parents criminally for neglect and abuse.

Answer 3

Of the brain? Certainly. Of the body? No. There is too much emphasis placed upon sports. Our country's children are 5 years behind the rest of the world, academically. Only those students that have earned a 'B' or better grade should be allowed to participate in physical activities or any sports, and maintain that GPA, not just get it once and forget it. Bill Gates is the only well-known specialist America has been able to call its own for decades. WHY? Our inventions have slowed to a snails pace. We are losing the 'Super Power' title fast. No one seems to notice, no one is looking and no one seems to care. Lets paint our bodies in our favorite sports teams colors and get stupid drunk at a game, yelling and screaming, get our plastered face on national TV so we can really feel as though we accomplished something great! Girls should distastefully display and starve their bodies of nutrients, ruin their body's ability to grow and develop properly, but walk around a school track, talking to their friends along the way, because it's exercise! As if that's going to help fix the problem of obesity. Haven't their brains been on a steady diet long enough? I'd say the lens on the camera of concern is way out of focus! Why not force them to learn instead of run? Stop social promotion, start academic promotion. The laziness this social promotion has caused is the real reason for obesity, no need to get good grades, they just move along to the next grade level like a herd of cattle, on their way to the slaughter, mindless, asleep. Who said the Matrix doesn't have us all?        

Answer 4

Read these statistics and decide for yourself:

-- Between 1962 and the year 2000, the number of obese Americans grew from 13% to an alarming 31% of the population.

-- 63% of Americans are overweight with a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 25.0.

-- 31% are obese with a BMI in excess of 30.0.

-- Childhood obesity in the United States has more than tripled in the past two decades.

-- According to the U.S. Surgeon General report obesity is responsible for 300,000 deaths every year.

Childhood obesity is not the only relevant statistic here. Good habits need to be set during the early years, otherwise obese children will become obese adults who give birth to children who will become obese.

Answer 5

Yes. Why? Its just as important as mental development.

Answer 6

Don't they already have compulsory sports/phys ed classes?

They do in the country I live in.

Answer 7

Yes.  In this age where we care more about how cool we are, no one seems to like PE.  But it is just as important, if not more so, as the the other classes.  Our country is getting more and more obese, and it all starts during childhood.  We need to face this problem, make this class mandatory for every year of school.  Make the children actually try in that class as well.  A healthy body is just as important as a healthy mind.

There is already a class devoted to it, but most of them aren't strict enough.

Answer 8

What I think should be emphasized in American schools from grades K through 7, is complete and total mastery of Mathematics, Language, Meditation with an emphasis on focus, and Imagination training as imagination is a crucial problem solving tool of the human brain.  It is not about teaching children to outgrow it, to "grow up" and stop their imagination, but about being taught how to CONTROL it.  By combining disciplined and rigorous math and language training, with constant imagiantion drills, by 7th grade, all the kids should be able to do even high level calculus completely mentally.  And work with Philosophical verbal language, also at a mental level.

Also, imagination training, if a session is set up to let it "run free," would make it so that their minds would not be bound by hard logic, but also be creative as well.  Then learning of Science, History, Social studies etc, can begin.  The best time for ethical training is during the teens; the reason teenagers in America are angry types is because by the time they are teenagers they realize the selfishness of the adult world.  The schools are not out to help anybody, and much of what they teach you can't use.  If however schools were set up decidedly towards self improvement, decidedly so that students mastered outright, instead of simply learned the subjects, ethics training is that much easier although....  The study of language ultimately would lead to ethics anyway, so that much would be covered.

It is of vital importance to make people smarter, if humanity's survival is to go from none to slim.  The only way people can become smarter, is by holding on to as many of a child's neurons as humanly possible.  We are all born with 100 billion neurons, regardless of race; during childhood though we lose them very rapidly.  The reason kids have an easy time with language, has to do with the fact that the more and earlier you bombard a child's brain under the age of 10, the more the brain sees a reason to hold on to neurons.  Because it is both rapidly forming permanent connections, and the cells are getting bigger, it is absolutely crucial to emphasize mastery of words and numbers during the brain's formative years, the time when they form connections at the fastest speed.

Education emphasizing learning, grading, and evaluation serves no purpose other than the maintenance of an elitist and tyranical power structure more akin to India's tyranical and bestial caste system, rather than an advanced society.  Besides, our dependency on computers is growing rapidly, but ability with mathematics is declining even more rapidly, worldwide, at an alarming rate.  Also, Isaac Newton said it; if you can not do it in your head, then you do not know Math.

That is the philosophy American schools should be engineered around "if you can't do it mentally, then you don't know it."  To re-engineer the American school system, you need to apply the Chinese principle of "Kung Fu," or, "perfection reached through long term effort."  Assuming a child is born relatively healthy and normal, and that the teacher is an impartial drill master, rather than a favoritist sociopath, it IS possible.  However the American board of education would never accept it.

Japan or China perhaps, problem is, such a method has never been tried before, so to prove it works I would need to offer myself as a guinea pig.  Yes, I am willing to go that far; I would willingly submit myself to experimentation at Tokyo U, or anyone willing to test my hypothesis to prove it works.  Thing is I'm not a child, I'm 27 turning 28 this winter.  However if I could do it in a year, that would be something.  It perhaps could help convince people to rethink the way education is viewed, as under this system; no more homework.

I'm serious; it would see the end of homework, after school was over the kids would be free.

later.

P.S.

American schools?  IT SHOULD BE AGAINST THE LAW TO BE OVERWEIGHT PERIOD, IT AIN'T HEALTHY!!!!  Did you know that in ancient Celtic society, if a man was fat and overweight, he had to give 25% of his crop earnings to the local chieftain?  Also, the chieftain I believe was allowed to have s*x with his wife.  Why such punishments?  To get the man to exercise.  True story.  When Julious Caesar attacked the Gauls he described them as "tall, magnifiscent men, not fleshy (fat) like eastern (middle east) men, but lean, and well developed of sinew....."  Believe it or not, fitness was a part of Celtic society.  It was the Saxons who made everybody fat and lazy.  So, if you're Irish, Welsh or Scottish and you workout, hey, you are honoring your heritage believe it or not.

Answer 9

Yes, but in the process, sports training should be taken off the agendas of PE teachers. Children often spend years being humiliated and miserable in gym classes, only to grow up and denounce the importance of physical exercise. I suggest that the emphasis should be placed upon PERSONAL fitness, and not learning how to shoot free throws, or run a mile, or whatnot. Some students enjoy gardening, others have an eye for archery, and many are future yoga gurus. I honestly believe that the misery young children endure in physical education classes is one major reason why our country has such a high obesity rate.