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Comment by anthomtb | Hacker News Reader

Not where I grew up. Sports teams, theater and music programs were all funded equally. All extracurriculars came with fees and fundraisers. One of the gym teachers, also the basketball coach, was useless if the team was likely to make a playoff run. One of the English teachers, the theater director, was equally useless during the weeks leading up to a performance.

I thought the GGP was being unfair to athletics. Scholastic athletics are a necessary outlet for a lot of kids, as are theater and music. If you are going to do away with one of them, do away with all of it.

Maybe in certain areas of the USA (Texas, the deep south) you get an excess of public money going to athletics, in which case GGP has a valid point. But that wasn't my experience.

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And in a country where 69% of adults are overweight, and 36% are obese [1], I would like to see even more emphasis on physical education (including after-school sports) rather than less.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

I've come to see obesity and our production of elite athletes as two sides of the same coin.

When I was in high school my baseball and football practices were 2-3 hours long and I would be exhausted and wheezing by the end of them. I have a knee injury from freshman year that still bothers me 20 years later. That's an insane time and energy commitment, I see why a lot of kids end up doing nothing.

I'd like to see more options that are lower intensity, don't require a commitment, and meet kids where they're at fitness level-wise.

I agree that the emphasis should be more on increasing participation rather than producing elite athletes - at least in public schools. I went out for football my freshman year and the practices were just way too intense/violent for me, and I eventually ended up getting injured and quitting. That experience pretty much turned me off from school sports for good.

If my school offered boys' badminton or volleyball (there were girls' teams but not boys), I could totally see myself as enjoying those sports.

Football and baseball are tricky cases because it takes a lot to get 11 players to work in anything like unison and if someone like the left offensive tackle (for a right-handed quarterback) forgets their job or is incompetent it's quite dangerous.

In baseball, the very basic skill of hitting is just hard to accomplish. It takes a lot of practice hours to get the bare minimum of competency.

But I think these are two very important cultural games and I would be sad if they weren't played in public schools, it would be a real loss.

So once again we face a problem and I really don't know what the solution is.

I think the US has a food problem more than an activity/exercise problem. Over the long term one cannot outrun a poor diet.

Attempts to fix this problem are met with derision and quickly toppled due to politics over reason, see: https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/healthy-school...

Fair point about diet contributing more to obesity than exercise. And I am 100% on board with making school lunches healtier, and teaching kids about the importance of nutrition.

But exercise is also important for managing weight [1], and preventing/managing chronic disease [2]. And only about a quarter of adults in the US meet the HHS' activity guidelines [3].

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesi...

[2] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-dept...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db443.htm

What about building schools closer to population centers and provide pedestrian and bike infrastructure to it from nearby residential areas, such that kids could safely walk or bike to and from school?

Its sleep everyone needs. Lack of sleep which is culturally forced onto a group of people with things like school hours, college hours, office hours, shift work, is the fastest most consistently subtle way to ruin people's health and keep them in check.

You'd be surprised at how many people lose weight just by sleeping better.

When was the last time you jumped out of bed with a spring in your step?

There is also such a thing as diet induced obesity.

In North America, due to its vastness, everyone has drive somewhere, how on earth can people get their exercise if they are driving everywhere? Europe, is compact enough so that people can walk and get stuff, but the food legislation will play its part in creating obesity.

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