I’m a bit pooped from yesterday’s adventures in tax protesting — be sure to check our Locker Room blog for the latest Tea Party reports — so here’s something I wrote a couple of years back about, well, kids getting pooped.
RALEIGH – I’m not among those test-fixated folk who want to eliminate everything from the school day besides reading, writing, and arithmetic. Neither formal public nor private education is justified purely on grounds of imparting basic skills or vocational preparation.
Public education – meaning the availability of tax-funded schools, of various kinds and governance – is justified by the need to produce informed, responsible citizens and voters within a republican form of government. Purely private education, sustained and shaped by bargaining among parents and educators, is pursued for a wide range of ends beyond basic literacy and job training, such as building character or worshipping God.
Wherever children are educated, their education should be broad as well as deep. Perhaps I am biased by personal experience, having grown up in a family of seven led by two public-school educators. My father was a special-education teacher and, later, a school principal. My mother was an art teacher. Strong believers in a well-rounded education, they supplemented our schooling with training in music, the performing arts, business, home economics, and athletics. They agreed with John Locke, though not knowingly at the time, that effective education included but was not limited to, as fans of Locke have put it, simply “Learning, Latin, and Logic.” Locke led off his famous Some Thoughts Concerning Education this way:
A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. He that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be but little the better for any thing else
Indeed, Locke begins his discussion of sound education by focusing on the health of children – their dress, diet, grooming, exercise, even ensuring a healthy digestive process. Unless these building blocks were laid, Locke argued, there would be no foundation upon which to build an engaged and probing mind. Because my sister went on to found the Charlotte Swim Academy, where one of my brothers also works, I appreciate that Locke even added a special word about the importance of learning to swim:
’Tis that saves many a man’s life; and the Romans thought it so necessary that they ranked it with letters; and it was the common phrase to mark one ill-educated, and good for nothing, that he had neither learnt to read nor to swim: Nec literas didicit nec nature.
To say that education should be well-rounded is not necessarily to say that well-rounded education can effect widespread change in family behavior or societal outcomes. For example, many policymakers and commentators in North Carolina, recognizing the prevalence of obesity in the current generation of children, have concluded that more efforts to promote physical education in school is the answer. By pointing to exercise, they are closer to being correct than those who wrongly blame childhood obesity on fast-food advertising or offerings in school cafeterias. Unfortunately, though, P.E. classes in school aren’t likely to be as efficacious as proponents hope.
For one thing, the quality of P.E. classes is spotty. Much of what students do during their less-than-an-hour is hardly strenuous. Should we improve that? Absolutely. Will teachers and parents, much less the kids, stand for it, should the improvement include lots of sweat and spirited competition? Don’t count on it. More importantly, the available evidence suggests a complex relationship between P.E. standards and incidence of overweight and obese children. A recent study published in EducationNext found that states with higher standards did not demonstrate a statistically significant effect on boys’ weight or physical activity. For girls, the effect was frustrating: states with higher P.E. standards did report more days of vigorous exercise, but that was offset somewhat by a decline in days of light exercise, apparently because the girls felt they had done their workout at school and cut back at home.
Again, I do not agree with those who believe that, in the interest of boosting academic achievement, schools should cut out their physical or arts education programs. Not only is this unnecessary – there are far better ways to enhancing reading, math, and science instruction – but it also denigrates the role that a well-rounded education plays in producing the well-rounded, mature, and responsible adults we want our children to become.
That being said, I don’t think we should advocate P.E. or the arts in schools expecting to significantly reduce obesity or significantly elevate our culture. What happens at home and in the larger society must change, too, or these factors will swamp the effects of formal education. There is tremendous room for we as individual citizens – by moral suasion and setting a good example, as well as by entrepreneurial effort – to address these issues through voluntary action.
What will you do?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.