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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   33640 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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My suspicion is that school sports are run entirely in the format most suitable for the school / teachers, not for the students.

Or, to put it another way, it’s fucking bollocks. Why, why would you have a system of training where the teachers and fast boys race ahead then rest while the unfit ones catch up? Setting off again before the slow boys who need it have a chance to rest? It’s practically guaranteed to make sure that the slowest overtrain and hate sports forever after. We could do so much better if we accepted that training has to be based on individual conditioning.

Why, why would you have a system of training where the teachers and fast boys race ahead then rest while the unfit ones catch up? Setting off again before the slow boys who need it have a chance to rest? It’s practically guaranteed to make sure that the slowest overtrain and hate sports forever after. We could do so much better if we accepted that training has to be based on individual conditioning.

Replace "sports" with "mathematics" and you'll see that it's the same issue, just "solved" using the opposite approach right now.

If you (that's an "audience you") think that teachers should just fail those who aren't good at math and have them repeat the year, why shouldn't the PT teacher just do the same?

School mathematics and school PE are rationalised differently. Mathematics (and English, and other subjects) come with an understanding like "you must know at least this much to be ready to be released into adult society", with grades tracking how close to the bar you are; sports instead are justified by "you must have done this much for your own good", with grades just serving as a way to incentivise those who never would voluntarily do enough sports otherwise to fill the quota.

In a setting where sports actually is "taught" for the purpose of everyone clearing a minimum bar (military training?), it seems absolutely conceivable that failing would be addressed by being held back.

I’m not sure I follow your point exactly. You’re saying that those who are bad at maths are just shoved back a year to fail for the same reason as before? If so, that’s definitely unfortunate. Streaming seems obviously required in both cases, and personal attention to the degree that’s possible.

I went to an expensive school which took maths very seriously and absolutely had the resources to take PE seriously too. Unfit children like myself should have been removed to a separate group to build an aerobic baseline, but the school just didn’t really care.

Replace "sports" with "mathematics" and you'll see that it's the same issue, just "solved" using the opposite approach right now.

Maths classes were, at least in my school, split by ability, while PE classes were not, at all. Even if you did that, PE classes are also divided by gender, so there would be a wider range of ability in them than in similar sized maths classes. I don't really think it's the same problem at all.

I remember in high school that 'making the cut' for any sports team got you out of PE, so the most athletic kids weren't in PE classes.

Now I also remember a lot of PE classes along the lines of 'run four(?) laps around the track and you're done after that' so students ran at their own pace.

Are you certain there wasn't some form of de facto splitting into higher and lower performance PE classes? How it worked back at my highschool was that there were multiple tiers of phys ed offered, and on paper the most advanced course was intended for senior students, but in actuality any sports team members and anyone who just wanted to participate was in this more demanding "just train with the football team and their coaches" tier as soon as they wanted to be.

PE classes are also divided by gender

Not always. I went to private school up until 8th grade, then public high school, both in Fairfax County, VA. All my P.E. classes were co-ed.

We could do so much better if we accepted that training has to be based on individual conditioning.

Yes, but that takes work. For work to be done consistently, there must be some form of accountability.

There is no accountability for bad outcomes for teachers and schools, so that work is not done.

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