The History Behind Physical Education On The Local Level

A major issue that has contributed to the rise of Hawaii’s physical education problems is its lack of qualified teachers. An astonishing three-quarters of Hawaii’s elementary schools don’t have specialized teachers for P.E. classes. Instead of relying upon hiring qualified P.E. teachers, classroom teachers, who may not even have physical education training, often teach P.E. in elementary schools. Having someone specialized in that field is important, as lifelong habits are formed primarily in elementary school. Having qualified teachers would not only improve the effects of the class for the kids, but it would also help to relieve some of the pressure from the teachers.

Hawaii has long been searching for a correct balance between academic and physical classes. In 2003, it was recommended that the year of physical education should be cut in half in order to incorporate two years of fine arts, foreign language, or career and technical education into the standard graduation requirements. The proposal was presented by the "Graduation Requirements Task Force", a group comprised of high school principals, college admissions staff, and other officials. Despite the acknowledgement of Hawaii’s relatively high youth obesity rate (22 percent, or twice the national average in 2005), talks about reducing P.E. requirements to half of a semester still went through. Such a proposal is a clear example of the lack of care that is given to physical education classes. The importance of physical education has been vastly underestimated, as it is considered to be a replaceable class. It’s been said that although such a change could possibly create a smarter workforce, it would also likely create a sicker workforce. Despite all of the effort that was put into revising the graduation requirements, the controversial plan to cut P.E. requirements was eventually dropped. Although this was a small victory for Hawaii’s physical education programs, it merely prevented from the programs from getting worse. Instead, educators should be looking for ways to improve the quality of P.E. classes that are taught in schools.

This lack of care towards the development of physical education programs has grown into a glaringly, blatant problem. State guidelines require forty-five minutes of P.E. per week for grades K-3, and fifty-five minutes per week for grades 4-5. These requirements fall far under the recommended 150 minutes per week. Not only are these state requirements so low, P.E. isn’t even officially regulated in middle school. The decision makers in Hawaii’s education system just don’t take P.E. seriously enough to take the initiative to improve it.