the motivation factor

the balance that schools have lost

The other night, to officially kick off our summer, my wife and I showed our kids a documentary called The Motivation Factor. As far as quality goes, this is no Werner Herzog or Ken Burns film. It’s clunky and the pacing is strange, and it picks up way too many threads to ever do justice to any single idea—BUT, it is still worth watching.

The genesis for the film was the La Sierra High School (Carmichael, California) physical education program that flourished from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Created in response to JFK’s callout in Sports Illustrated (!), “The Soft American,” Stan Leprotti, the PE director at La Sierra, went all in. Years ago, I found an old news report from the 60s that looked at the program’s remarkable success. If you’ve got 13 minutes, you should definitely watch this clip. Called “The School Where Fitness Counts,” this is a brief documentary on the program.

After watching that program, I Googled around and found that someone had made a full-length documentary about physical fitness that used the La Sierra program as its hero’s narrative. That movie is The Motivation Factor. Clara and I watched it then and showed it to our kids the other night.

I shared the 13-minute video with a class one time and asked them for their feedback. Everyone was amazed at how thin, powerful, and athletic almost every kid in that school was. It is amazing to look back on, like those old beach photos from New Jersey in the 70s, where everyone is relatively thin and tan, juxtaposed with modern photos that make everyone look like extras in Wall-E. Then, one kid made a very astute observation: he said that the program could never exist today because if one kid didn’t make it up in the levels, the program would be shut down for being mean and unfair. It was hard to question his logic.

For we are in a race to the bottom when it comes to physical health in our country. If President-elect JFK saw a problem in 1961, imagine what his reaction would be today. The CDC published an article last year called “Unfit to Serve” about the scope of the problem for our nation’s youth:

• 1/3 of our youth are too heavy to qualify for Army enlistment.

• Among the young adults who meet weight requirements, only 3 in 4 report physical activity levels that prepare them for basic training

• Consequently, only 2 in 5 young adults are both weight-eligible and adequately active.

In 2018, according to the article, 71% of our teenagers are ineligible for Army participation, either because of physical fitness problems (the number one reason), educational deficits, or a criminal record. This is. . . bad.

Not that every American needs to join the military, but the standards are not that high. It is not as if 71% of American youth can’t pass the BUD/S course, but basic training. Something is grievously wrong with the way we raise our youth if our system yields such statistics.

So, whatever happened to physical education? And, is it possible to bring it back?

The subtitle of The Motivation Factor is “to Become Smart, Productive, and Mentally Stable.” I think each of those goals works in unison in a way obscured by our current way of doing school. By reducing education to its cognitive component, we have denied the complexity of the human beings who are formed through the educative process.

In Plato’s Academy, the first three hours of the day were spent in physical education because the Greeks understood that a balanced life cannot be all “head.” You must have hands and heart as well. The harmonious life is a life of balance. Our current educational model drastically skews children towards the “become smart” goal. And it does this very poorly.

As we have ceded more and more of the educational day to academic classes, with students sitting inert behind desks learning subjects they have been given no context for or reason to care about, we have taken whatever paltry time existed away from play. But young people learn through play. Moreover, the sports-based model of physical education is not actually physical education.

When you look at the exercises completed by the La Sierra students, you see what a true physical education focuses on: mostly core work. Physical education in its truest form is not about getting better at football or basketball; rather, it is about learning how your body works and learning to use your body in a productive, controlled way. There are plenty of really good athletes whose physical education is poor by these standards.

The short answer is “yes, we can have this again.” We can do whatever we want. But, do we want this? It is hard to argue that we have much collective will when it comes to improving health. We treat symptoms in this country, not root causes. The irony is that physical education increases mental education.

And, for the part of the title I haven’t addressed yet, physical education also helps with mental health and wholeness. Almost everyone acknowledges today that exercise is as effective (if not more so) at treating depression than medication. Intuitively, we know this. The endorphin rush after a workout, the mental health benefits of the color green, and our widespread biophilia as a species all conspire to make exercise medicinal to us.

Rather than teaching our children to see their lives as a harmonious balance between their brains, their bodies, and their hearts, we have taught them to see each in abstraction and isolation. It is tearing us apart.

When we got done watching the movie—scratch that, before we even finished—we could see a dramatic reaction from our children. Our youngest got on the floor and started alternating planks and push-ups; our daughter got out my balance board and her hula hoop; our oldest got out our kettlebells. After the film, even though it was bedtime, they rushed outside to play. Baskets were shot, soccer balls were kicked, and they came in for bed flushed and happy.

We used to have this in our schools. We can have it again.