By Nature Embodied: The Essential Role of Physical Education In a Liberal Arts Education

Man is by nature body and soul, and therefore, our bodies are not accidental.  We know this intellectually as Catholics, but we also experience this reality when we move and strive physically.  There is tremendous satisfaction and joy when our bodies are attuned to physical activity.  Just as working with your hands brings delight, the formative movement of the body offers a true satisfaction that acts as a foundation for meeting all other challenges and missions throughout the day. 

It has been well established that physical activity helps children to thrive in their studies and overall sense of wellbeing.  Growth in physical excellence can also be a boon to a child’s spiritual wellbeing.  And yet, in the classical education world, physical education has not received the same level of attention that reading, mathematics, Latin, literature, or poetry have.  

Historically, the formation of the body was seen as an educational foundation.  Within traditional academies, before the seven liberal arts were taught, children were given an earlier formation in music and gymnasium.  This nascent education was seen as a prerequisite for all later studies.  The goal of this first soil of education was to form the heart and intuition and lay a template for the path to virtue.  This first education was for the sake of forming what children would come to love and hate, what they would intuit as right or wrong.  It would teach them the discipline required to desire and pursue virtue. 

Whereas music trained the objects of the heart, gymnasium offered dispositional gifts of integration, fortitude and strength   This foundational education was anthropologically coherent, reflecting our nature as both body and soul.   Additionally, this traditional physical education acted as a sort of metaphor for spiritual and intellectual growth in virtue. Thus, gymnasium played a key role in fostering a deeper engagement with our own embodied nature.  

It is unfortunate that physical education has seen a steep decline in schools over the past decades.  One merely needs to watch footage from John F. Kennedy’s P.E. initiative, known as the U.S. Physical Fitness Program, to see how far we have declined in our physical formation over a relatively brief period of time.  This decline corresponds to a general movement away from reality as we become more and more engrossed in the digital world, the matrix of the unreal.  Society’s dysfunctional attitudes towards the human body are also partly to blame. The human body is objectified in harmful ways, and the obsession of both men and women with certain bodily images has been confused with authentic physical training. 

But true physical formation is not about forcing our bodies to match some idealized physique. Nor is it simply a means to obtain scholarships or sports careers.  On the contrary, training the body is about becoming the highest expressions of ourselves as incarnate creatures composed of both body and soul. The right course in imagining an excellent physical education class in this vein is to begin with essential questions. What is the nature of our bodies?  What are its functions and, therefore, its range of excellences?  How can we design a physical education program to help children pursue these excellences? Once we have addressed these questions, we can move on to the development of a full physical education curriculum in the spirit of the liberal arts academy. 

Although sports can be an important component of this program, it is important to note that an athletic program cannot replace an integrated physical education program. As P.E. programs have increasingly given up an emphasis on bodily excellence for the sake of sports training, children have begun to learn highly specialized movement patterns without having foundational physical integrity.  To make matters worse, children are now pressured to specialize in only one sport.  In previous generations, a child might play three or four different sports throughout the year. 

Now a child is funneled into specialized sports training in one sport as early as elementary school.  Why?  For the very same reason that has led to so many dysfunctions in schools: an obsession with college and career readiness.  If a child is competitive, we are told, they might win a scholarship at a prestigious school or even become a professional.  The tens of thousands of dollars that are easily spent on the industry of extracurriculars are justified as an investment.  

There are many problems with this trend, but from a physical educational perspective we see premature physical specialization and, more importantly, a loss of the simple celebration of movement. Most sports do not teach fundamental human movement patterns; they presuppose them.  Dribbling a basketball or throwing a perfect spiral are not the “macronutrients” of human movement. Some sports do feature fundamental human movement patterns.  For example, running, swimming and throwing are all foundational human movements.  Thus, cross country, track and swim have this primordial character.

Ball-based sports build on this foundation and teach children to work as a team. Churchill claimed the beaches of Normandy were won on the fields of Eaton.  But what coaches will discover is that students with a well rounded physical education are better equipped to participate in ball-based sports with less risk of injury.  A good P.E. program ensures that children remain physical exploratory generalists, even if they go on to specialize in a particular sport.  

In order to fully incorporate a gymnastic curriculum, we want to keep in mind our bodies’ fundamental physical capacities.  The goal of our curriculum is to cultivate bodily excellence.  I would propose that these areas might be parsed out as mobility, strength, endurance, power, and fluency and integration.  This is not the appropriate place to break down what each of these entails in a P.E. program, but I’ll offer a brief explanation of each:

1. Mobility: Our sedentary culture has narrowed the range of human movement, but physical excellence requires that we widen physical movement to the full range of its nature. If you want to tire a group of teenagers out quickly, ask them to perform a variety of low gait crawling races and tag sessions.  I have found that even elementary school children already struggle to sit in a proper unsupported squat.   
2. Strength: Strength is the ability to move a load from one point to another.  This skill is foundational to all human activity because it allows for appropriate and safe movement.  Strength training is less about building muscle and much more about training the nervous system.  Strength work can begin with calisthenics for young students, then progress to a more challenging weight lifting program as their age and ability allow. 
3. Endurance: Endurance is the ability to engage in physical activity over time.  This is often trained through running, swimming, cycling, rowing or skiing.  Endurance sports also train a child’s ability to persevere, offering an incredible formation that extends beyond their physical capacities. 
4. Power: Whereas strength is the ability to move a load from one point to another, power is the ability to move a load from one point to another with a factor of speed.  This fast resistance movement usually begins with one’s own bodyweight. Early on it might include jumping, bounding and throwing.  Lifting an external load with speed is a more advanced skill that requires expert coaching.
5. Fluency and integration: Although the obsession over body image is deeply damaging, one of the ends of physical education is indeed beauty.  But we should be a bit less concerned about a certain physical look and more interested in the beauty of movement.  If you watch an excellent runner hit their stride, a swimmer glide through the water, a dancer perform a leap, there is incredible beauty in that movement.  Children can be formed in this fluency of movement through regular training as well as by moving playfully and simply taking joy in movement.  Perhaps the best possible way to introduce beautiful fluid movement is through dance. A great P.E. class would also incorporate tumbling and gymnastics.

Integrating each of these components will result in a balanced, rich program that will help students of all fitness levels practice fundamental movement activities. Students will explore the full range of human movement in both high and low gaits.  This means crawling, squatting, balancing, lunging, rolling forwards and backwards, jumping and falling.  Students will be able to move their own body weight with grace and ease.  There should be an opportunity for students to run, and for those schools with access to the right facilities, students might even engage in swimming, skiing or rowing. 

Every student should learn to dance, and I am of the opinion that students should learn basic martial arts.  Obstacle courses can be a fun challenge that offers an infinite number of possibilities. In short, a P.E. program that follows these principles acts as a remedy against the sedentary sloth of our culture, fostering in its place perseverance, patience, and love of excellence.

If we invest in a robust physical education program which truly helps children grow as generalists in their basic bodily capacities, we will find that the fruits of these efforts will extend through the full range of their lives.  As John F. Kennedy asserted in 1960: 

For physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body; it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The relationship between the soundness of the body and the activities of the mind is subtle and complex. Much is not yet understood. But we do know what the Greeks knew: that intelligence and skill can only function at the peak of their capacity when the body is healthy and strong; that hardy spirits and tough minds usually inhabit sound bodies.  

Furthermore, as Catholics we know that the mission the Lord has given each of us in this life is an embodied mission. Our self-understanding is an embodied lesson, and the gift of ourselves back to Christ is a free act in the context of action and self-sacrifice.  St. John Paul II writes in Theology of the Body, “Man, whom God created male and female, bears the divine image imprinted on his body ‘from the beginning.’”  Embodied excellence means celebrating this divine image that exists within our bodies.