Free sample essay on physical education

This brief overview of the program foci in physical education’s heritage provides a framework for the subsequent discussion. The Greek began the first programs that resemble today’s physical education, calling those who contended for a prize “athletes.”

At wrestling schools, sons of upper-class Greeks learned to run, jump, throw, swim, and wrestle. Upon reaching adulthood these citizen-soldiers trained in military/athletic events at a gymnasium.

Following more than 1000 years of apathy toward physical development, with the exception of the knights during the Middle Ages, European gymnastic emerged in the 1700s and 1800s.

Based initially upon naturalistic principles concerning each child’s interests, needs, and capabilities, many programs expanded due to nationalistic goals.

Participants in school, military, and community programs exercised on apparatus, such as paralleled bars, vaulting horses, climbing ladders, and balance beams, and executed command response movements with little freedom permitted.

Some running, jumping, throwing, sports, and games were included, but in most cases these remained secondary to the gymnastic exercises. European physical education today remains gymnastics-oriented.

The English, through worldwide colonization, spread their love of sports and games in the 1700s and 1800s; this contrasted dramatically the continental emphasis on more formalized exercises.

English schoolboys and the lower-class factory workers in the industrialized urban areas separately participated in their own sports. Immigrants to the United States, especially from England, brought with them sports and games and ensured their permanence here.

The freedom and competition of sports appealed to the nature and aspirations of this new citizen much more than did the formalized gymnastic systems.

Hygiene, the science of preserving one’s health, was the focus of many early school programs. These programs were often called “physical culture” or “physical training” because of the beneficial effects of exercise.

This latter term reflected an emphasis on strength, popular in the late 1800s. Gymnastics, especially from Germany and Sweden, found some adherents around the turn of the century, but fees programs fully adopted these systems.

“Physical education” at that time became the accepted term for the emerging, eclectic programs that combined gymnastics, strength development, sports, and hygiene.

During the next half-century, physical education, although the accepted descriptive label of the field, faced various identity’ clashes. Athletics, internationally synonymous with track and field events, in the United States described organized sports competitions between highly skilled individuals.

Since athletics in colleges preceded physical education programs and later merged with them, confusion resulted because many people thought that the two were the same.

Although in the schools and in small colleges this situation continues, many people have recently separated the two in program and in objectives.

In the 1960s, individuals who led in the emphasis on the sub-disciplines wanted to rename “physical education” “human movement,” defined as the theoretical structure and scholarly approach of how the body moves most efficiently.

Titles such as “human kinetics” and “kinesiology” were also proposed to provide credibility to this attempt to break out of the “play games in a gym” stereotype and to emerge as an academically recognized field of study.

While “physical education” remains the most common title for instruction in various human movements, by the year 2000 “leisure studies” or “sports sciences” may have surpassed it both in popularity and in specificity.

Throughout this book the more recognizable term “physical education” is used in a broad sense to encompass programs as diverse as Greek athletics, European gymnastics, English sports, and American programs from a (athletics) to w (wellness) and from traditional school programs to non- traditional programs in many settings.

With this brief perspective of physical education’s background, in mind, it is now important to establish the scope, aim, purpose, and objectives of this field.