Recently, there has been widespread discussion and debate about the possibility of rethinking how secondary physical education is conceptualized and delivered to youth.
These discussions have proceeded with the assumption that in many places high-school physical education is sufficiently dysfunctional that it needs to be replaced rather than repaired, completely reinvented rather than improved.
Fortunately, there is evidence that such change can take place and some interesting models are beginning to emerge. For instance, in New Zealand, more than 150 high schools have replaced a traditional multi activity approach with the sport-education model in a drastically revised tenth-grade program.
Likewise in Florida a required fitness semester is followed by semester-long courses in a variety of activities.
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In many places, there have been experiments with health/fitness clubs in high schools, using an adult model of participation rather than the more compliance oriented, regularly scheduled model common to most schools. In other schools, physical educators have adopted a total fitness perspective.
What is most needed at the moment is a better understanding of how such innovative programs get started and how they are sustained. They are exciting. They do give us all hope for the future. Unfortunately, they too often have a way of not outliving the creative persons who developed them.