A parent in Coquitlam, BC received this letter from his child’s School Board. The Daily Physical Requirement is explained here. While exercise is a good thing, one wonders if the education bureaucrats should be intruding into a family’s life outside of school hours? It’s unclear what would happen if a parent refused to fill out the form.
h/t ‘Pongo’
Black Mamba is exactly right (no surprise there). Yes, it is easy to lie on the forms and make the issue go away, but the school officials don’t really care if you lie; they just want you to tick the boxes so they can tick the boxes and report that they are “taking action against the epidemic of childhood obesity”.
Nothing was quite so motivational in making a life-style change as the the kid who yelled to his team-mates “Hit it to third base; lard-ass has no lateral movement.”
It should be understood that there is a difference between school and education. Many complain that there is little useful education happening in school, but don’t realize that academics were never the intended purpose of widespread enforced public education. It was to maintain a compliant workforce. It was to train the population to be somewhere between despair and ambition. Despair could lead to revolt and the elite wanted to keep the ambition to themselves.
This effort in BC is one more exercise in keeping both the children and parents constrained and servile. One should read the books of a NY state teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto, especially “The Underground History of American Education”, or an easier quicker read is “Dumbing Us Down” They will enlighten you to the true purpose of institutional learning. He freely admits the lessons subconsciously imbued were stronger than the listed syllabus.
Socialists love school because, by its very nature, serves as a breeding ground for more socialists The whole process has had a cumulative effect over the years to the point where the entire schooling monolith thinks virtually the same.
Does twerking the teacher count?
I removed my children from the Province of BC in 1997 and their school system was a large factor in the decision, with many actions similar to this. They (our school district in a Vancouver suburb) adopted the ‘co-parent’ model long before Saskatchewan succumbed, this notice is just the natural progression as professional educators ‘re-educate’ actual parents on the errors of their ways, and on how they _will_ get with the program. SWAT isn’t far behind in this progression.
We moved back to BC for a year after Singapore. My son skipped a grade to grade 5 and still topped his class in math but was sent to the office numerous times at recess for climbing a fence, throwing berries, being loud and wrestling with his friends.
I honestly bieve that he and his sister learned absolutely nothing of value in that year, before we moved back to Singapore and they started real school again.
The terrorists in control of the BC government have figured out that laws are not required to control everything. They use “administrative policies” and the like. There’s administrative driving offences, administrative dui checks etc etc and now it’s administrative PE checks. I’m waiting for administrative taxes, they’ve already taxed breathing here.
Heard that plastic spoons and forks are “not welcome” in local elementary schools in my city. You could send them in your kids lunch if you don’t mind your kids being made examples of and teased, I guess. Are they going to watch the kids and see who had the gall to bring the plastics in? Or will they ask the other kids to rat out the contraband?
Oh, and what was all that hand-wringing about school-yard bullying? What would this be called? Institutionalized bullying?
If the schools wanted to encourage exercise, the simplest thing to do would be to prohibit parents from driving their kids to school every day. I’m amazed at the size of the traffic jams that occur in an area (that normally has hardly any traffic) early in the morning and when school gets out. Maybe if someone in high school lived more than 5 miles from the school one could argue that it might under some circumstances be acceptable to take a bus. I’ve talked to parents who seem to think unless they pick their kids up and drive them 4 blocks home that some unmentionable disaster will happen.
I quite enjoyed my 4 mile walks to and from school as it was a chance to explore Calgary as well as get warmed up for phys-ed class. What I find curious now is that no-one seems to walk anywhere any more, especially young people who have become used to being transported everywhere by their parents. Quite a change from my high school days when we were expected to find our own way to school.
Other physical pursuits involved gopher hunting which required a considerable amount of walking as well the the bicycle ride past the Calgary city limits, late night walks around Nose Hill to test out our night vision, tree climbing as well as climbing onto the school roof and other easily scaled buildings. Presumably bomb making could be viewed as a form of exercise as it was a matter of lighting the fuse and sprinting as quickly as possible to a position of safety to watch the blast.
Had I been given a form of this nature when I was in high school, one of my possible responses would be to scrawl “take this form and shove it where the sun don’t shine” on it, make a paper airplane out of it and throw it into the principals office. Other options in that era would have been to fill the form with hexadecimal representations of EBCDIC character codes (that was my IBM mainframe era), or fill it out using cyrillic anagrams.
The sad fact is that kids in BC show up for PE class in grade 8 and they can’t catch a ball. They are fat and they can’t run for three minutes without stopping. 5 minutes and they puke. Kudos to the Ministry of Education for doing something about that. Or trying to. 30 minutes a day? Like walking to and from school? Double it before we become a pathetic, fat province that can’t catch anything but a cold.
no Steve, the point of this whole thing is this – it’s NOT up to the government to enforce exercise regimens. It’s up to parents on their own time. Sadly we live in a day & age where people think the government needs to be in every part of our lives.