Translated material
Running in place
School physical education can't wait to be updated
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently once again called on the Minister of Education and Science Andrei Fursenko to pay attention to the issues of physical education in schools. “The organization of physical education classes in schools must be changed and raised to a new level of quality,” the president said at a meeting with the head of the Ministry of Education and Science in August of this year. Andrei Fursenko admitted that today physical education in schools is boring, so it is necessary to change both the approach and teaching standards. Active work in these areas is being carried out jointly with the Federal Agency for Physical Culture and Sports and sports federations, the minister was quick to inform the president. And he assured that the new standards would be legalized by the summer of 2008.There are supporters of the opinion that school physical education does not require such high government attention. However, this problem has long gone beyond the walls of the school gym. According to Rosstat, over the past decade the proportion of healthy children has decreased from 45.5 to 32.1%. At least 60% of students in Russia have one or another pathology, 80% have low motor activity, which is not compensated for by physical education lessons. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and crime are spreading rapidly among teenagers and young people. In this situation, exciting physical education lessons at school could become one of the foundations of a healthy lifestyle for the young generation of Russians, but for the most part they only cause boredom or disgust in children.
Our children are celebrating the new school year again in their “old school sports uniform,” which means they will be running circles around the school, puffing on the uneven bars and jumping over the “goat,” while using every opportunity to get a certificate of exemption from such “exciting” activities .
Let us note that the leadership of the Ministry of Education and Science does not like to touch on this topic in its public speeches. Although resolving the issue is within the competence of this department, officials apparently consider it non-core and therefore not so significant. Meanwhile, the Federal Agency for Physical Culture and Sports, which has its own clear action plan and practical experience in solving this problem, has been actively involved in the discussion about what the updated school physical education should become over the past two or three years.
The fact is that last year Rossport began implementing a large-scale federal target program “Development of Physical Culture and Sports in the Russian Federation for 2006-2015,” for which more than 106 billion rubles were allocated. This program is unique in many respects, but the following is fundamentally important: for the first time in our country, the priority direction in the state’s sports policy is not elite sport, focused primarily on winning at any cost, but mass folk sport, which is designed to introduce people to a healthy lifestyle, make health the main value guideline for Russians. A considerable part of the program’s budget funds will go to the construction and modernization of sports infrastructure in educational institutions. New modern gyms, swimming pools and stadium grounds in schools should create the necessary conditions for “the introduction into the educational process of an effective system of physical education, focused on the developmental characteristics of children and adolescents.” This is provided by the program.
Rossport specialists have developed and prepared proposals for modernizing the system of physical education for children and developing children’s and youth sports in educational institutions. Their essence boils down to creating sports clubs on the basis of schools with their own multi-level competition system. The basis of the physical education lesson should be a game approach, and performing exercises on the wall bars, push-ups and running will remain only as a light warm-up before the match. We are talking about introducing sports-oriented education, which assumes that every child will be able to find something to do according to his strengths and interests. For example, it is recommended to organize aerobics classes for girls, and teach martial arts to boys. Children with poor health will form a separate group with reduced loads. Experimental methods were successfully tested in dozens of educational institutions in Chuvashia, Omsk region, Surgut and Moscow region. By the way, in May 2006, a school near Moscow in Ramenskoye became the venue for a thematic “round table”, which was attended by representatives of the department of Vyacheslav Fetisov and Andrei Fursenko. In this school, according to the Rossport method of “each school has a sports team,” there is a basketball section that unites children from all over the area.
The Ministry of Education and Science generally supported Rossport’s proposals to introduce a sports and training component into the educational process. In parallel, the ministry tasks are being solved to improve the status of physical education teachers and increase teachers' salaries as part of the transition of teaching staff to an industry-based remuneration system. But education officials are in no hurry, and this slowness is clearly not compatible with the president’s policy aimed at reviving mass sports and mass physical culture, which will contribute to the moral and physical recovery of the nation. If this department is so slow in its approach to the implementation of this project, which is on the periphery of the attention of officials, then perhaps it is worth giving this issue to the jurisdiction of Rossport, which, according to the Federal Target Program, is responsible for the “sportization” of the entire population of the country. And things will go faster. At least athletes are not slow.