It’s not my opinion. It’s science.
“When kids do physically hard things, consistently, it makes them feel better about themselves.
It makes them feel capable, confident, & accomplished.
I am not demonizing academia, but if we can beat the books, but not carry cinder blocks, we will always have problems.”
-Ray Zingler on Twitter
Schooling is not what contributes to the success or failure of our children.
Education is.
You might think they are the same, but they are emphatically different.
Schooling is the indoctrination of (government) mandated curricula in which students are judged on how they perform on standardized, government issued tests. It’s essentially a game of who can memorize the most and display their memorization skills the best on scantrons.
If you’re not the best at the memorization game, a loop hole you can use is money. Ivy’s and the likes love $100,000+ (often still not enough) donations with applications.
Education, per Oxford, is “an enlightening experience”.
Education is the concept of exposing and teaching practical, applicable (related to life) concepts to children and allowing them to be the drivers of the bus as to how they interpret/use what they learn (or don’t).
The goal of education is to create creative, critical thinkers, not programmed robots.
Now does your child’s school look more like schooling or education?
Exactly.
(Real) Education in the modern world, must largely be taken into our own hands as the government still uses a 100-year-old broken system to “teach” (judge) our kids.
But anyway, let me play devils advocate.
Why do we “teach” math, science, history, & spanish?
Why don’t we just omit them or place incredibly low emphasis on them?
Shoot, by the time the kids are 18, they’ll probably get it figured out or something, right?
No, that’s stupid. We teach them because acquiring literacy and knowledge requires learning. The subjects I just outlined are LEARNED subjects.
But Physical EDUCATION?
Physical education, the subject which has grotesque amounts of research on it’s importance to all pillars of health & well-being, we use the, “they’ll probably figure it out when their 18” method?
Call me crazy, but physical education (exercise, training, healthy eating, etc.) are just as, if not more important than the math and science that we pound our kids into submission with and judge their potential value to society on.
Just ask any person who can crack every book, but can’t climb a flight of stairs without getting winded.
We need a systemic shift in our approach to PE.
And I promise it isn’t coming from the government anytime soon.
