Physical Education should be implemented to enhance learning

Promotion of sports in schools would be an opportunity to make students physically fit, develop their talents, identify their abilities and limitations, become creative and enhance their sense of social responsibility.

The chairman of Uganda National Examinations Board, Mr Fagil Mandy, recently identified two critical problems facing our education system: excessive numbers of children dropping out of school and the neglect of extracurricular activities in schools.
A study by UNESCO indicated, in 2010, that Uganda has the highest school dropout rate in the East African region. At the same time, more than 300,000 children (almost 40 per cent) who enrolled for P.1 in 2006 did not attend PLE in 2012 because they dropped out of school. This trend persists every year and is, therefore, a serious national problem.

The solution prescribed by Fagil Mandy for this, however, will not remove the problem. He said head teachers should be held accountable for school dropouts! He advised that contracts and salaries of head teachers should depend on the number of children retained in school. I disagree.

Head teachers cannot stop school dropouts. The bigger problem lies with the wider environment and requires suitable policies to address pertinent social, economic and political obstacles. Some of the factors that drive children out of school include: poverty, lack of scholastic items, child labour, early marriages, high birth rates, hunger at home and at school, diseases, death of parents, and an exam-centred education system. Surely, government bears responsibility on all these.
Fagil Mandy also noted that less than 10 per cent of schools in Uganda expose learners to physical and co-curricular education. Schools today work hard to deny pupils any form of physical engagement. Children spend most of their time doing class work, and thereafter receive piles of ‘homework’ to occupy any possible free time they might have outside school. ‘Homework’ occupies children’s evenings and weekends. During school holidays, it is euphemistically branded as ‘holiday package’. Very few schools still attach value to physical education.

However, the fathers of formal education (Greeks) revered the notion of a sound mind in a sound body. They treated body education as an indispensable factor of school curricula, emphasised physical and academic learning as inseparable parts of education and stressed a balance between sports and intellectuality!

Promotion of sports in schools would be an opportunity to make students physically fit, develop their talents, identify their abilities and limitations, become creative and enhance their sense of social responsibility.
Scholars say, physical fitness boosts people’s cognitive domains and promotes learning. The near-total absence of sports in our schools indicates that as a country, we have settled for a dull approach to education that is disempowering, uninventive and altogether unprofitable.

Venansio Ahabwe