Physical Education at a Classical School
In the early 1930s, R.G. Collingwood, a prominent intellectual at Pembroke College, Oxford was concerned about the rise of Nazism and its implications for Britain and Europe, and borrowing a line from Book V of Livy’s Histories, he compared himself to the sacred geese dedicated to Juno in Rome that had warned of a surprise Gallic attack in 390 BC. He wrote in his autobiography in 1939, “I am a professorial goose, and my job is to honk.”
In my role as headmaster, I have found myself in something of a similar role. Less in warning about the rise of fascism, and more in calling attention to the challenges our culture poses to the education of youth. In future perspectives, I will take up more predictable subjects such as the issues around declines in reading and the habit of attention, but this perspective specifically concerns itself with the place of physical fitness within a classical education. Few parents choose Ridgeview with physical health or athleticism as their primary motivation, but I would suggest that we cannot be successful in a part of our mission without being successful in the whole of it.
Usually when people draw a connection between physical health and classical education, they quote just one line from Book X of Juvenal’s Satires: “mens sana in corpore sano,” (a healthy mind in a healthy body), but the quotation merits some context. The passage in its entirety reads as follows: “You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of Nature's gifts; that can endure any kind of toil; that knows neither wrath nor desire, and thinks that the woes and hard labors of Hercules are better than the loves and banquets and soft cushions of Sardanapalus. What I commend to you, you can give to yourself; for it is assuredly through virtue that the path to a happy life lies open.” There is much in this that aligns with other aspects of Ridgeview’s mission: courage, perseverance, self-reliance, a willingness to undertake hard things, resilience, grit, determination, virtue, and the connection of all of this with…a happy life. As we have said countless times, we are not college prep, we are life prep; and, what we want for our children are happy and meaningful lives.
Unfortunately, when it comes to physical and mental health, our public institutions are emphatically not preparing people for happy lives. In tacking this on to the rest of our mission, we walk a line between curriculum creep (neglecting the fundamentals in trying to do too many things) and the soft bigotry of low expectations. Jacques Barzun, writing about the American university system in the late 1960s, lamented something similar. He wrote, “The university has become the general container, the chief catch-all of modern society, just as the medieval church once was. The schools must do everything that the rest of society leaves undone. They must give vocational training, moral guidance, physical exercise, psychological support, social opportunities, and general culture, besides imparting knowledge and developing the mind. And they must do this for everybody, at all times, in all places, under all conditions. The demand is impossible to meet, and the attempt to meet it has changed the character of the university, making it less an institution for learning than a machine for processing people and problems.” Are we exacerbating this problem as it applies to K-12 education by giving attention to the problems of physical education, or is physical education a part of our core mission?
The inclusion of physical fitness within classical education is well founded. Plato, in the second book of The Republic discusses it at length, Aristotle takes it up in the Nicomachean Ethics and books seven and eight of his Politics, Plato has Socrates discuss it in the Gorgias dialogue, Juvenal in his Satires, and Xenophon in Cryopaedia. Hippocrates wisely wrote that, “If we could give to every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.” The American innovation was that not everyone would be expected to participate. The athletes would, which constitutes as much as forty percent of district school students nationally, but leaves sixty percent of the population neglected. Moreover, only around two percent of these students will obtain an athletics scholarship to attend college. Even for the athletes, then, it’s an odd place to put all of one’s eggs as only between one to two percent will go on to play professionally after college, and less than two percent are still playing the sports they played in high school in their thirties. In short, in the American context, it’s too often all or nothing. Physical education is either the thing a student is good at, at the expense of everything else, or they are good at something else while they wither physically. The inclusion of physical fitness for only a portion of the student body is what is at odds with classical education—not the expectation that all will participate.
The ramifications of this exclusionary mentality are immense. Among teenagers, obesity has surged by nearly five times since 1963 with only 24% of teens meeting the minimum standards for daily physical activity. In 1955, Type 2 diabetes in teenagers was almost unheard of, but between 2001-2016, scientists documented a 7% annual increase tied to obesity and insulin resistance. In 1955, mental health and anxiety disorders among teens hovered around 2% of the population, but by 2023, 21% of teens “experienced persistent sadness/hopelessness” with 11% attempting suicide, and 15% reporting anxiety disorders. An abundance of evidence has detailed the relationship not only between physical fitness and mental health, but between mental health issues correlating with lower academic performance and higher instances of substance abuse. Even in 1955, American teens lagged behind their European counterparts in terms of physical activity per day, but by 1960, American teens were showing consistent declines in cardiorespiratory fitness. Ninety percent of schools in the 1950s required physical education, and by 2020, less than 50% of schools had any requirements. This has led to higher rates of chronic disease, and a diminishment in quality and quantity of life for these students as adults. In the 1950s, pediatric norms were 8-10 hours of sleep per night, and the issue of sleep deprivation was largely untracked. By 2023, studies showed that 27% of teens get fewer than seven hours of sleep, with the national average at 6.7 hours per night. Sleep is impacted by screen time, of which, American teens are getting an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes per day compared to 3-4 hours per day for their European peers. The nutritional quality of their food has worsened dramatically. In 1955, around 10-15% of a teen’s calories came from processed foods, and their sugar intake, while still high, was around 80g per day. By 2023, 60% of their calories came from ultra-processed foods, and sugar intake rose to 130g per day. Boys are in particularly poor shape: their grip strength, a longstanding indicator of upper-body strength, is less now than their mothers were at their age. As their BMI has increased, it has been strongly correlated with diminishing testosterone, which diminished around 25% between 1999-2016 alone. This is not just a question of manliness, but of health: lower testosterone in adolescent boys results in delayed puberty, reduced muscle and bone density, depression, infertility, and cardiovascular issues. The responses from officialdom have turned our woes into a cottage industry of counseling services, jobs, drugs, camps, programs, conferences, and corporations. Following the advice of Hippocrates would have done more for free to prevent our problems than all of the expensive and mostly ineffectual solutions that have been foisted on us. The state is, whether intentionally or unintentionally, prescribing limits to its citizens’ lives, and managing the population as though they were conducting an animal husbandry operation.
Robert Hutchins, a prominent American intellectual of the 1940s, wrote in an essay entitled The Great Conversation that, “Liberal education was aristocratic in the sense that it was the education of those who enjoyed leisure and political power. If it was the right education for those who had leisure and political power, then it is the right education for everbody today.” Despite the critics claims that Ridgeview is an elitist institution, it is far more likely that it is tremendously egalitarian in the sense that is wants what is best for everyone. If it is better to be well read, let us come together around the seminar table and read. If it is better to be healthy than sick, then by all means, let our curriculum reflect that we have taken a stake in physical fitness.
Having established that we want physical fitness as part of an education for life, we must also acknowledge that its ends are not entirely individual—they are also collective, which is to say, we have a civic interest in physical education. Citizenship, in fact, is the first of our character pillars. A description of that pillar reads as follows: “I recognize that I am a member of an established community and will practice my rights, duties, and privileges in such a way as to uphold and preserve the benefits of citizenship for others.” How we maintain ourselves impacts the fellows we are bound up with. It is central to why we chose the Hoplite as our mascot: the Hoplite was a citizen soldier and his phalanx worked only in concert. In failing to make health a priority acquired and developed in youth, Americans have incurred higher rates of taxation to fund billions in health care costs, and have been forced to absorb trillions in lost productivity related to poor health and premature mortality. In contributing to the problem, how can we possibly contend that we are “upholding and preserving the benefits of citizenship for others”?
Considered from another perspective, I was recently asked whether I wanted to make every student a soldier. I answered in the affirmative, but in the sense that I also want to make every student capable of goodness, of happiness, to be well read, an informed voter, financially literate, and capable of giving the fullest civic participation, and I am not so naïve as to believe that this may not mean military service for some of them. While only 4-7% of Americans have served or are serving in the military, and even fewer have seen direct combat, the phrase, “Freedom is not free,” attributed to Air Force Colonel Walter Hitchcock, and later inscribed on the Korean War Memorial, applies here. The aspects of civil life that we enjoy as Americans will require periodic defense. That is not someone else’s responsibility—it is ours. We should be capable of providing it, but over 70% of military-aged males are so unfit as to be ineligible for military service without waivers. While this entire percentage is not attributable to obesity (criminal records, medical conditions, and poor ASVAB scores contribute), the small percentage of American youth ready to provide military service represents a national security concern and a failure of public schools to take their commitments to citizenship seriously.
Finally, we are committed to physical education for all because it develops resilience. We can talk ad nauseam about snowplow parents and the mollycoddling of boys, but there is no substitute for failing. Success shows us comparatively little about an individual’s character. Winston Churchill once quipped that, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” It has been said so much that it is almost becoming proverbial, but if you are not failing, you are probably not trying hard enough. There will be students who are good at writing, but poor at math; good at math, but poor at writing; good at running, but bad at push-ups. A part of what school is trying to identify is not what a student is good at, but what they struggle with. And, a good school does not just note it and move on; they attempt to rectify it. What they cannot do is to pad and buffer the disappointments of life so thoroughly that the student comes to believe that if it’s to be, it’s up to someone else. They have to feel their failures and setbacks, be allowed to receive life’s feedback, and to grow in response. This incessant need to coddle them is a kind-hearted cruelty that makes for fragile people unable to make their happiness in the world. As Carol Dweck recently wrote in her book Mindset, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.”
We are calling attention to physical fitness for all of these reasons, but at base, our motivation is humane. We want for better lives. The body, like the mind or the soul, is a part of our constitution. We cannot neglect it without dire consequence, and those consequences are not hypothetical or a matter of opinion. They are discernible nearly everywhere we look, whether anecdotally, statistically, clinically, or scientifically, and there is no way out of our problems save effort, resolve, and the application of intelligence. That is what Ridgeview is bringing to the fight.
D. Anderson
Headmaster
