Physical Education should be taught differently than it currently is.

Physical education as a whole, is actually not required in some states. Colorado is a state where only 20% of schools have PE offered, and yet is the thinnest state in the entire country. While, Mississippi, being the fattest, has required PE in grades K-8. [1 and 2] Florida is also one of the happiest states in the country and also has absolutely no PE requirements. [3] Florida also only has an obese population of 23.5 percent and is a relatively thin state in the country compared to Mississippi having an obese population of 31.5 and then Colorado which has an obese population of 18. [2] There are several conclusions we can draw from these statistics: 1. The lack of PE education in Colorado drives students to be physically active on their own, instead of the boring, stressful and awkward gym environments provided at schools. 2. Strict PE requirements leave kids in gym classes that turn them off from the idea of being physically fit and healthy since they are quite strenuous, fatiguing and an overall annoyance to the students. This leads them to become fatter and fatter until they eventually form the fattest state in the country; Mississippi. 3. The lack of PE makes citizens happier! Not being required to take PE in schools and being physically fit on your very own way that may be incredibly easier than the schools way lifts mountains of stress off of people and leaves them inspired on their own to be fit. There is no exact violation to student rights in the assigning of homework, but there are detrimental psychological affects to homework. People all need what psychologists call "consolidation" which is the time away from work when new things are learned when the brain processes new information and gets a good grasp over it. If students have a daily 30 minute required exercise margin along with their hour or so of homework, all piled on top of any extracurricular activities they may be enrolled in, it leave them little to no consolidation time for their brain to process the new information and understand it. The fact that now even MORE homework would be piled onto kids would lead to less understanding and comprehension in newly learned topics, lower test scores, lower general grades, and may not even sufficiently provide for the health of the students. There are NO gains at all in mandating at-home physical activity along with the daily classes provided in schools. My opponent presents statistics along with the conclusion that the PE system is currently failing. This is not true. If it were completely failing as he states, then we would have no fit people at all. Obviously it is still teaching between 69 and 75% of the population to be physically fit and does still have a generally good success rate. A 75% in school terms is a C, or average, which really isn't all that bad. Except my statistics show that increasing the mandates on PE discourages students from being fit and leaves a much lower success rate while leaving them to do it on their own and with much less force yields higher results in overall fitness. When my opponent states that teaching them health exclusively is not affective, my statistics prove otherwise and this is simply not the case. Secondly, a requirement to be fit and healthy as my opponent proposes would actually be a form of body size discrimination and is completely unjust. Why can't a person be extremely thin and have very few muscles and be incapable of continued exercise? Why is it wrong for a person to have received a gene that gives them a low metabolism and so makes them incapable of losing weight easily? It is a person's one choice (for the most part) at what their goal is for their bodily appearance. Having an imposed standard would be discrimination and would be morally wrong. What is wrong with being "too thin" or "too fat"? It is that persons own body and they have their right to it. My opponents proposition still fails to conform to the rights and individual choices of a person while still proving to be an ineffective form of PE. It will also fail to conform to people's bodily decisions and preferences until there is an option for no exercise like we have in our current system. A Diet log also faces the same critical flaws, except in a higher degree. Socialism is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. [4] This diet plan would have to be imposed throughout the country and would involve laws and therefore would be political, and so this proposed "diet plan" is actually socialism. Certain diets only work for small amounts of certain people and there is absolutely no good way of finding a diet for a certain student. They may want something, but the diet does something else. None of the diets may be effective, leaving them hopelessly failing PE. This is riddled with failure and people find many more failure stories in dieting than success stories. There could be no standards to this at all as every plan would be distinctly different and yield completely different results and therefore could not be graded either. Besides, what happened to the individual right to choose which type of salad you want to eat?!?! Exercise is beneficial, but only in certain ways and to certain people. There can not be a mandated plan for exercise because it will result in failures for some people and make many people extremely upset. It will also frustrate them and leave them less time for academics and result in lower test scores and overly stressed students. The fact is too, the people who are allowed to individually exercise yield much better results and are much happier persons than those who are forced into a laboriously slave-like gym class all for the sake of fitness, which causes a lack of morale in health because it shows an extremely strenuous side of it, and also yields much less success and happiness than individual fitness. Health rests within the individual, and it cannot be standardized because it simply won't work. 1. http://www.drwoolard.com... 2. http://calorielab.com... 3. http://www.psychologytoday.com... 4. http://www.merriam-webster.com...