Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, is joined by Patrick Whalen to discuss the virtues of physical education. Patrick Whalen is founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics.
Learn more: https://k12.hillsdale.edu/
Hillsdale K-12 Classical Education Podcast
A 20-minute podcast featuring professors, K-12 teachers, and friends of Hillsdale College, all speaking about classical education—what it is, why it’s still relevant today, and what makes it unique. Hosted by Scot Bertram.
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Welcome to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast, bringing you insight into classical education and its unique emphasis on human virtue and moral character, responsible citizenship, content, rich curricula, and teacher led classrooms. Now, your host, Scott Bertram.
Thanks for listening. The Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast is part of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More [email protected] or wherever you get your audio. You also can find more information on topics and ideas discussed on this show at our website, k12.hillsdale.edu. Today, we hear a conversation between Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, and Patrick Whalen, founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics, about the importance of physical education in classical education. Here’s doctor O’Toole.
Well, I’m so pleased to be joined by my old friend Patrick Whalen. Patrick and I have known each other since high school, I think. Yeah. Patrick is in addition to being an old friend of mine. Patrick is the founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics, a K-12 fitness education operation. And Patrick and his colleagues at Iliad Athletics teach K-12 schools across the country what it means to have excellent P.E.. Before that, Patrick was the founder. Yes. Of Saint Martin’s Academy.
That’s right. Yeah. That’s correct.
And also a marine. And I’ve learned from the Marines. I know that you you never talk about that time in the past tense.
Once a marine, always a marine.
Welcome. Marine veteran Patrick Whalen.
Uh, Katie, thanks so much for having me. um, uh, and I was, I’ll confess, I was thinking of a particular story from high school. Uh, I remember a road trip with you, and I want to say my sister down at the University of Dallas a long time ago. And, um, this is going to age, you know, or date us a little bit. But the, the cool technology at that time was one of those little, um, radio transponders. So you could play music through, through the car stereo.
Like you could like find a radio station that didn’t have anything on it, but static and hooked that up to your iPod. Yeah. That’s right. And then you could play your. Oh yeah. And we had it for the road trip.
Is this the one where there was also a birdcage with a live bird?
On the lap of the person sitting in the passenger seat.
That’s true. There were days.
Straight bird song, Johnny Cash and static.
Those were the days. Okay. That was it.
That’s right. That’s right.
Well, the first thing I want to hear about is Saint Martin’s. You founded a school? Yeah, yeah. And it. It’s not with respect, Patrick. A typical school.
No, no. That’s right. Yeah. No. And and, uh, so I did about ten years in the Marine Corps, ten years active duty. And I, and I left active duty and I was doing graduate school and I had an old friend from, from high school who had been kind of poking me every couple of years about, hey, when you are ready to be done playing marine, uh, let’s, let’s start a school and it’ll be really cool and it’ll be a farm and we’ll teach them how to farm and how to like, you know, just memorize all the poems, like all of them, and we’ll do a song and it’ll be really manly. And this is how this is what we’re going to do. And I kept saying, this is great, great idea. I want to support you. But that’s not that’s not what I’m going to do. But he won. That is what I did. You did go do that. I did go do that. That’s right. And what I just described is pretty much what we did. Uh, I’m being it’s a little flippant, but, um. Yeah, Saint Martin’s is a is a Catholic school. It’s a boarding school and it’s all male and it’s just for high school. And it’s down in southeastern Kansas, a little town called Fort Scott. I want to say our first year was 2017 or 2018. I feel like I should remember that, but and, and yeah, it’s a, it’s a classical curriculum, but the boarding environment allows you to do things that a lot of schools can’t do. Like, for example, introduce manual labor on a, on a farm, chores happen, you know, early in the morning and later in the evening. So the boarding environment allowed us to kind of introduce this a pretty strong kind of physical element. And I, and I think for me at least, the experience in, in the military and then at Saint Martin’s was very much a formative. And how I found myself now working in physical education, but a key. Distinctive at Saint Martins was this shared physical experience that the student body had with. With their faculty, with their teachers working alongside them. That provided a kind of substance for the work that we did in the classroom or the academic work, the intellectual work. So yeah, and I will say just, you know, to shout out to those boys, I think they’ve now, I mean, you can imagine this is a fairly intense environment. I think they’ve been the Kansas State rugby champions, like a couple of years, maybe 3 or 4 years in a row now.
At all. Small school. They should not. I mean they’re just punching above their weight. It’s so hard in rugby and yeah as you say, not surprising. I’m not sure if that’s because we memorized all the poems or not.
There’s a there’s if you know certain type of person, there is some funny connection between memorizing poetry and playing rugby that would not. It becomes apparent to you after you’ve met a certain number of these people, of which you are one, I think.
Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Yeah. That’s right.
So it’s a it’s an intense physical experience to go to this school and an intellectual experience.
And now your work is thinking about that very thing.
That’s right. And I’d say to that, that the Marine Corps was also that not so much intellectual or academic. But on the other hand, there’s. You know, I think some of the most beautiful things I’ve had the opportunity to do in my life involve leading Marines. There’s something I mean, like heartbreaking or just like very beautiful about the relationship between an officer and his men, especially like in a deployment or before deployment. I’ve had, you know, a mom come up to me as we’re getting ready to go and say, you know, bring my son home. I’m just like, this is a this is a heavy responsibility. It’s also a beautiful one. And that so so those relationships are intense. The the Office of Leadership. There is both physical and. And it has a moral valence as well. So it’s not just that you’re responsible for keeping these guys in great shape, you know, working them hard, training them hard. But there’s also, you know, it’s, it’s deeper than that. There’s this whole kind of accountability. You’re part of a community of folks who is serving a particular end together. And I think that that constitutes a real form of friendship. So thinking about about the role that the body played in that formation and the pursuit of that kind of friendship, and even the learning that happened there. And then obviously at Saint Martins. Yeah, that’s the body. And, and physical training has been a huge part of my access to or my, my perspective on learning and and even the life of the of the mind.
So you today are teaching schools how to have good PE class.
Tell me, you know, how is it that PE is not something separate from the rest of what goes on in the in a school. I mean, physically it’s separate, right? You sit, you read, you talk and the other classes and in PE you change clothes, go to a completely different. Go to a completely different setting. Run around.
How is PE really part of the classical curriculum or just just a good education?
Yeah. Yeah, that’s it’s great. I think, you know, maybe there are two. Two ways to look at that. One would be like the simplest way to say this would be a good education, uh, helps you to be good in your life, you know, true to what you are, um, responsible for the things you’re responsible for. And so I think the the role physical education plays there is, is you have a body if you’re alive, you’ve got one. And that body is going to. It’s the only one you have for the over the course of a lifetime. And it has certain duties, certain responsibilities, and the potential for certain kinds of excellence and physical education is giving kids the tools that they need, the knowledge, the skill, and the habits that they need to cultivate that excellence over the course of a lifetime. And, you know, part of that excellence, I think, is, is service and your duty and your responsibility to others, which inevitably is physical or includes the physical. So that’s, I think the simplest sense is this is part of a whole human formation. But then I think beautifully, it relates to the rest of the academic experience. And you can see this a little bit in the work we were doing at Saint Martins, but I think a rich, broad and kind of intense or strong physical experience really provides kind of substance or material that the life of the mind, or that the intellect can work on and deploy or use or handle in the rest of the of the education. Maybe a simple way to say this would be like if you’re reading, you know, Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice, where he uses these two strong metaphors of extreme heat and extreme cold to describe a human kind of soul in distress. You know, you can imagine somebody very hot tempered, and that’s a certain kind of bad. But then you can imagine somebody who’s, who’s cold, you know, ice cold. And that’s also bad. What if you didn’t actually had never really been warm or cold yourself? You’d always just been in perfect 70 degree temperature. No actual experience of those things. Never felt ice, never been burned, never been uncomfortably cold. The poem might sound nice, but there’s a certain kind of core to it that our physical experience helps, helps unlock for our intellect.
Yeah. The good. When I teach high school, I teach philosophy. Sometimes I teach English. I teach that kind of stuff. Why do I want the students in my class to have a great PE teacher?
Yeah. Oof! Okay. See? That’s great, because that’s what that. Because that is what you want, right? You do these things, they threaten to be a bunch of, you know, the corporate terminology, a bunch of silos, you know, within the curriculum, all the subjects or these distinct silos. And you kind of shuttle from one to the other, checking in and checking out of your various workstations. You know, that’s, that sounds dystopian. Um, I think you can imagine what it would look like to have some. You working on some great text. You know, I, I’m kind of partial to the Iliad. Um, you you might have guessed. You can imagine working on, on some text like that in a classroom where you’re, you’re, you know, engaging with the students have these conversations and, then if your PE teacher was also, I would say, also liberally educated and classically trained, read the same books, understood the same poems, had the same kind of cultural inheritance, and then was demanding things of those students putting, putting challenges to them in those terms and the terms that the great challenges, the, you know, the great heroes, the, the, the daring, the, the noble, the, the, you know, the tragic, all of that. If you’re framing the opportunity for you, not as some historical relic, but as a contemporary 21st century kid. Um, but framing it in the context of the rest of the curriculum like that. Now those two classes are fueling each other and the kids showing up to the, you know, the students showing up to your, your literature class with this kind of rich, rich physical experience and sense of challenge and, and participation with that larger story. Um, there’s one example I’ll give you, which is at Saint Martin’s one year I was teaching the sophomores literature class and I was essentially also their PE teacher. So in this case, I ended up having both sides of the deal. But we were reading the Iliad, and this is a large part of why I named the company Iliad Athletics. Because of this, this insight that struck me, awe struck the student. Uh, there’s this concept that Homer talks about, uh, in the Iliad of the joy of battle. And, you know, abstractly, that’s a those are just those are words. And I’m sitting there in a classroom with a bunch of, you know, 15 year old teenage boys trying to talk about the joy of battle and make it mean something. Try to actually land a punch like intellectually. And, you know, Homer’s not ham fisted. It’s beautiful. He talks about the tragedy of war, but also about the kind of the glory. And that’s, that’s that’s possible there. And the joy of battle is part of the latter. Um, and I just clearly was not I was spinning my tires with these guys, you know, it’s just a poem. It’s old. The language is a little difficult and we’re lazy and so we don’t care, you know? And so I took him outside and I split them up. You’re the Greeks, you’re the Trojans, you are Patroclus, and you’re dead now. Sorry. You’re gonna lie down in the middle of this this, this grassy field. And your guys job is to get the body of Patroclus and drag it back to your side. If you’re the Trojans, you’re going to take them to your city walls. And if you’re the Greeks, you’re going to return them to the ships and you’re going to ground fight. And, you know, if you tap out, you’re on the sideline. And I understand maybe not every school can can do this exercise, but this is we could and, you know, so this would go for several rounds. And as we’re coming, you know, we’re walking back into the classroom to, to discuss what just happened, you know, a little bloody lip here, lots of grass stains. One of the kids breathing heavily was like, hey sir, I think I understand what Homer means by the joy of battle. And the point is that little exercise way out. Did anything I could say to them or, you know, it it it taught that lesson much better than. And, you know, you’re probably a better teacher and could do a better job with that concept. But for me, I needed that exercise to give him some physical experience of what that that kind of thrill in the center of the chest when you’re going to go do something a little scary and a little awesome. Yeah.
Yeah. So practically too, they just love to move. They need to move, especially little ones. I mean, I remember, I remember when we, when we had our school down in Texas, one of the things that we would, that we were kind of very stubborn on was three recesses a day.
Until fourth grade. And then I think it was two recesses a day. And it was, it was Plus lunch and a break after lunch.
And you know, on the on the on the on the schedule, that looks like an incredible sacrifice of time. Because look at all of those minutes. Couldn’t you be spending those doing content? The answer is no, you couldn’t. And actually if they know that there’s a moment when they’re going to be able to go outside and run and be free and take a break.
Then when they come back into the classroom, they’ll be able to focus.
Huge. I mean, this is like practically speaking, this is, uh, there’s so many tests, so many studies being done that are proving this point in spades. And it’s time outside, outside, like actually outdoors and then time with kind of unstructured free play. Are they will pay dividends in the classroom and the students ability to focus their attentiveness. And I, and I think so practically, like it’s a home run, But but also, I think there’s this magic that happens, which is the content doesn’t have, you know, content doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s this, this idea of, of their physical experience is kind of substantiating what they’re capable of even thinking about and interacting with intellectually. So that recess, that third recess of the day where they play some game, it might just so happen that when they come back into the classroom and you’re introducing this thing from history or mathematics, there’s this immediate physical touchstone that they’re they can reference from recess. And you couldn’t possibly plan everything that we need in order to, to, you know, kind of grow and mature that way. But recess, it happens naturally.
Yeah. So think about, um, had principals, uh, headmasters, people who are in charge of designing the PE program. What are the things that need to happen in your view? As you know, K-12 for a child’s physical education.
So I don’t I won’t spend too much time on the negative, but I do think it’s helpful to kind of point out some of the problems that are, that are common in contemporary physical education. One is PE shouldn’t be miserable. So and I think we’ve really gone in recent years, we’ve really tried to make PE not miserable by removing any stakes, any motivation and any call to excellence, any real challenges. I think we’ve said, well, not everyone’s equally physically gifted. I would also say not everyone’s equally intellectually gifted or academically gifted. Um, but because it’s really obvious that we’re not all equally physically gifted, I think in PE, we’ve kind of said, well then we can’t really challenge our students because then some of them are going to feel bad. And so when you. One thing to say is that when you remove challenge entirely, it feels like busy work. Because it is. You’re not actually, I’m teaching or inviting the students to go through the process of growth that we know of as education. And they know that even if they couldn’t put it into words. And so then this feels silly and not worth my effort and attention. And so I won’t give it so serious challenge is one part of this. Um, and then I think the other is, is maybe just an accident of because PE is not an academic discipline. I think it’s easy to think that this, what constitutes a good PE program is just kind of burn off some energy, like get, get out there, run around and that’s fine. And so what you will often see is PE teachers saying, hey, come up with a program like it’ll be great. Just here’s a whistle and a clipboard. And you know, you look the part. So like, go get them. And you know, and you know, God bless him, the folks who are the many who are thrust into that kind of a role, they do a great job and or they they do their best. But once again, like I think students can kind of tell if there is no coherent structure, you know, a curriculum is a course that you run. It comes from the Latin kuraray to run. And I think, uh, if you’re, if you’re just, it implies a course, uh, rather than just kind of running around like a chicken with your head cut off. And, and so if you think of a curriculum like an itinerary, there’s a starting point and some place that you’re going. And I think a fault in many PE programs is that actually neither of those two points ever are articulated. Uh, so the point, you know, where we are going, does the PE program actually have a purpose? Have you articulated it? Have you thought about your school? I mean, this is this is not this is true of, of entire schools, not just PE programs. But does your school have a clear mission and do. Does everything that you do within your school serve that mission? So that would be like where you’re going and how does have you thought as a school how PE fits into that? So where are we going? And then in PE in particular, you would say, well, where are you? And in my view, that would mean understanding the actual physical capabilities of, of your students or how, what are they capable of? And so that’s going to mean objective measurement. And so, um, so to answer the question, I think a good PE program is going to be rigorous. There’s going to be a serious element of challenge. Um, ideally that challenge is going to be issued by somebody. I’m going to use this term like worthy of issuing a challenge. So somebody that the kids, when you challenge them, the response isn’t, this is dumb or I don’t care that you’re challenging, but somebody who has the charisma or the, you know, the, the ethos to, to level, you know, look you in the eye and level you a challenge and have it not be intimidating or off putting or anything, but actually have it be inspiring. This is a challenge from this person who I, I, you know, I can accept this challenge. So rigorous and then coherent and replicable. So coherent. Does it actually define where you are and where you’re trying to go? And then is it replicable? Can if there’s a new teacher next year, are you asking them to make it up from scratch, or are they falling in on something like, this is how we do this. And it’s sensible and it makes, you know, we, we can do it over and over again with multiple, you know, different classes. So I think that that’s kind of a, those are the basic ingredients that go into a good program.
Yeah, I think that’s helpful. So if you were to, um, walk into a PE class, you know, as someone who’s knowledgeable about what the curriculum ought to be, what physical training is like, what are some things that would tip you off immediately to show you that it’s going well or not going well?
That’s interesting. I mean, I read something that you were writing earlier today about that kind of the teacherly skill of attentiveness to the students.
And so I, you know, I would always start there. You got you’re taking the temperature in the room, you know, what’s the electricity like between this teacher and these students? Is it is it cold? Is it charismatic? Is it engaged? Is it, you know, is it hostile or threatening or intimidating? Because, you know, by the way, I think the overreaction to like removing all stakes and never challenging anybody might have come because there were some teachers who were kind of, you know, cold and abusive and, you know, sitting in the car and blowing the whistle run faster. And this kind of the opposite of leading by example. So the first thing I would look at is, is that what do the students want to be there? And I think the second thing is, are they being challenged or are they being coddled? And then is the thing, is the challenge coherent? Is it actually building there? And I, you know, I think about physical education over the course. A good program is going to set a student up for success. Give them the knowledge and the skills and the habits to cultivate fitness over the course of a lifetime. So the real test is not how they graduate, you know, middle school or high school and how many pull ups they can do. Then I think the real test is much harder because it’s going to take 40 years, 50 years to know. But did, did this person get the memo that I’m responsible for this, I’m responsible for my body and I have the tools to do a good job, you know, and I have a motive. I have the desire to kind of pursue excellence here in its proper relation to all the other ways in which I’m called to excellence. So yeah, those are the things I would look for. The other thing, and this is there can I think, you know, I don’t want to be too much of a totalitarian about about physical education. I think there can be some reasonable debate about this, but many programs pursue specific sport literacy as their end state. So I would say, you know, a curriculum, it’s a trajectory from point A to point B, and what they’ve done is they’ve taken point B as our students are going to graduate knowing all the rules to volleyball, baseball, golf, etc.. And so then what P.E. class is, is a series of lessons about the rules of these, all these different sports. And then you’ll probably end up spending some of your class time playing those sports. And I think that is not what PE should be. I don’t think that gives you the knowledge, skill and the habits to cultivate fitness over the course of a lifetime. So I would look for, if I were going into into a class and trying to say, is this is this working? Is this moving in the right direction or not? I would look for an emphasis on on functional fitness, which is simply your ability to perform well at any of the almost unquantifiable number of tasks or challenges that nature might present to you. Uh, you know, as, as a body, you know, some. Yeah. So there’s just little things like can your body move properly? You know, do you have good posture? Can you do a squat? Can you pick up a bag of dog food off the floor and put it in the trunk of a car? These are these are the little things that when you’re, you know, in your 60s or 70s, if you haven’t, if you haven’t done that, right, if you don’t have the knowledge and the skill of how to do that, um, you’re actually going to have some serious issues or potentially have some serious issues. So, so anyway, I would, I’ll end by saying that the focus on not just on kind of sports, but the focus on really, and I think this is, this is, um, this is where my approach to PE, I think is chiefly classical in that it’s kind of we’re oriented toward the primary text of physical education in the same way that in the, in the, in literature class or in philosophy, we’re interested in the primary text, the fundamental things that apply to everyone. Well, not everyone is going to be a professional golfer, but everyone needs to be able to squat. I mean, and that doesn’t mean you show up to every PE class and all you do all day is squat. No, I mean, I think there’s there are ways to do this well, but the emphasis is ruthlessly functional and not kind of pursuing kind of dead ends of, you know, this or that particular sport. One more caveat I’ll add to that. This is kind of a statement full of caveats, but this is not to say that sports don’t have a place in P. Their place is simply not the end state there. Sports are wonderful tools for evaluating, for testing, and for putting a body through its functional paces. But you shouldn’t mistake the the means for the end. So sports are a great means, but they’re not. They’re not. Ultimately, in my view, they should not be the end of a P program.
So that’s very clarifying. Functional fitness is the idea. In other words, that there are some basic movements and an amount of strength that is required simply to live.
And that PE should focus in developing that first of all in the students.
And that’s similar to what we’re doing in the rest of the curriculum. There’s some stuff you have to know simply to live.
You have to understand some stuff about nature, understand some stuff about human beings.
And then from that, you can specialize.
You can become, you know, an academic. You can become a plumber. Both of those things are going to require the acquisition of some kind of specialized knowledge.
And then as a hobby or maybe as a professional athlete, you would, you know, really be working on your golf swing.
That’s right. And more power to you. You know, if that if that’s your particular in the same way, you know, if you want to study ancient Sumerian, like awesome, we’re probably not going to do that in 10th grade. You know, like, by all means, what we’re going to do is give you a broad foundation so that that ancient Sumerian situated in a context. You understand what it means in relation to everything else. Same with your golf swing. We’re probably not going to burrow in and make you an expert in K through 12 PE.
And there are a couple what I would say, and this is where the civic responsibility or civic virtue comes in. Some parts of our the Iliad athletics curriculum involve things like um rescue carries. And so we’ll say, you know, what is an what is the excellence of the body look like? Um, can you be helpful to your fellow human being in distress? And so we actually, we do, we spend a little bit of time working on like the proper body mechanics of moving, you know, a body out of harm’s way. And so we look at police and firefighters and like, as examples of these are folks who are kind of serving, they have a civic duty. Um, but any one of us might be, might show up to a situation where somebody needs to be moved out of harm’s way. And so do you know how to do this? And have you cultivated the strength to be able to do this? Are you are you contributing or are you kind of a bystander? Physically.
Yeah. So, so thinking more about your your suggestion about sports and the role of, you know, education and particular sports, wouldn’t you say? So like E.D. Hirsch would say, cultural literacy would probably say like, even if you’re not going to be a football player, it’s good to know what the first down is, even if you’re not going to be a golfer. It’d be good to know what par is just because people are going to be talking about that stuff. And if you’re at a loss, if that word doesn’t have any content in your mind, you’ll be at a loss in conversation and therefore kind of unable to participate in society.
Yeah. Yeah. And so, and this is exactly this is why I say there’s, I think there’s room for reasonable debate on this. And I’ve, as you can imagine, I’ve been in these debates. Um, I, and I acknowledge the cultural literacy point. I also care about it a lot less in the specifics of physical education than probably other parts of the curriculum. Uh, and the reason is the reason I care about it less is I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but, um, there are, there are doctors in Michigan who are prescribing drugs like Ozempic to 12 year olds, uh, despite, you know, in us having state standards that mandate physical education for kids that age. Um, there are many adults. I think the point is we have a, we have a health crisis on our hands that like basic movement kind of sanity around healthy levels of movement and nutrition are not we? We just don’t have them as as part of our culture at, at, you know, at the moment. And what we do have is so much TV and screen time that is just full of all the nuances of first downs and par. And so I think you would, it’s almost impossible for you to, um, you know, escape adolescence not knowing about those things, but it’s, it’s not just possible, but it’s endemic that you, uh, you grow up not being basically physically, physically capable. Yeah. Um, so it’s kind of, maybe it’s the argument is like we’re on crisis footing, like great about, you know, the nuances of volleyball rules, but like 12 year olds are on ozempic. Yeah. Right. Let’s focus.
Right. And they don’t even they don’t even have the habit of moving. Yeah. You know.
Yeah. No. That’s right. Yeah. Our I. I mean, basic instincts like this are, um, we’ve kind of lost them. Yeah.
Um, so let’s think about parents now. So what advice would you give to parents about how to make sure their children grow up so that they are physically strong and able?
Yeah. I mean, I, it sounds so, um, sounds so much like my parents growing up and my kids are going to be if they hear this, they’re going to roll their eyes. Screens are one of the great inducements to sit still and stay inside. And they’re, uh, you know, they, you’ve read all the things that they’re, you know, they’re not particularly healthy for us and especially for young people for whom.
This study just came out of toddlers who had been given early access to screens. And there’s less white matter in their brains because of it. Yeah. So it’s like their their brains aren’t the organ of their body. The central organ of their body is not forming properly when their two and three and four years old, because they’re looking at a fake thing rather than the world.
It’s a tragedy. I mean, it’s a tragedy that is not you know, I’m not a big fair warrior, but that’s not fair to those kids. It’s it’s.
Uh, so, so like start there, right? As a parent, start there. We’re not doing the screen thing or, or have serious articulated, decisive limits on what, where, when and how, you know, how much. And then the second, the that’s, I think that’s the first thing because by the way, then boredom is a great inducement to activity. Mhm. And, you know, potentially like virtuous activities like, you know, read or go play outside. Um, and, and, you know, the second thing I would say is, uh, and this is, this is tough. And I realize that particular, you know, circumstances can, can make this either prudent or imprudent, but like, kick them outside. Um, you know, so if you remove the screens or you seriously curtail them, and then you create either a strong incentive or just basic rules around this, this much outside time that’s, you know, we’re talking about how, how do you, um, rehabilitate movement. I think those two things alone would be, I mean, those two things alone would, would probably remove us from a youth health crisis. And that’s not good marketing for my P program. Right. You know, no, actually, the only thing is our PE program. Um, no, actually just cut the screens and kick the kids out outside.
Yeah. And so many parents might be thinking, okay, but what do I put outside so that they. Yeah. So that they have what they need. And that reminds me, so early in the Barney Charter School initiative, this classical school, one of the early classical charter schools in Colorado called Ridgeview classical schools, loomed large in the mind of of all of us who were getting this thing started. And the original third grade teacher at Ridgeview came to work at my school after Ridgeview was already 20 years old or something, and so I. And she was there from the beginning. So I got to hear all of this Ridgeview lore, and one of them was, you know, it’s this charter school. It’s starting with nothing. It’s just an idea about the curriculum. And their desks were, you know, bought from Salvation Army and like duct taped together and stuff. And the kids on the first day of school were sent outside to recess. And there was no grass. There was it was just kind of like a dirt parking lot. It was like, go have recess. And these kids looked at the teacher like, uh, what? You know, we can’t have recess here, but within a week, oh, with nothing but just a fenced in kind of flat area. They had invented all this amazing stuff to do during recess.
Oh, man. Yeah. You know, this this connects to all the conversation about the the role of recess in kind of shaping the intellect and, and pop, you know, populating the imagination with, with, uh, rich material. But, you know, what do you put out there? Sticks are great. Um, you know, this is, um, in the Marine Corps. Uh, I was so when I was enlisted, I was in the infantry and there is, I think this is universal across infantry units. If you have a bunch of infantry Marines, uh, who are bored, somebody’s Kevlar helmet is going to get put upside down. So it’s like a bucket and then you’re going to throw rocks into it. You know, that’s, that’s like it’s a universal activity. Like it’s helmets, a bucket. And now we’re, you know, from various distances or maybe with the left hand throw, um, you’re going to try to throw rocks into the helmet, you know, which is better than throwing rocks at the other Marines, obviously. Yes. But yeah, I mean. It doesn’t take, Uh. This is funny because sometimes we’re asked this about like, okay, so this sounds, oh, we’re, we’re, we’re getting a serious PE program. So this sounds like there’s going to be a bunch of expensive equipment.
What’s, what does the budget need to be?
And I’m like, well, no, you know, easy.
Some heavy stuff to carry.
Yeah. I mean, I know teachers who filled, you know, milk jugs with sand and like brilliant, brilliant. That’s, that’s so great. But anyway, your point, what are they? Um, kids actually the, you know, boredom is, is a great, uh, proving ground for creativity and imagination. Yeah. It’s wonderful.
Our backyard has a swing set. Yeah. With three swings on it. It has a tree with a rope swing from it. Yeah. It has a series of about 15 or 20 tree stumps that we buried in the ground to make a kind of a stepping stool. Oh, nice. And then there’s a beam that was left over from something that we put on the ground as a balance beam.
And and then some buckets.
You know, like old, you know, like kitchen buckets or something that or kitchen bowls or something that they use as buckets and that those things plus the hose, my children are four and five now equals three plus hours of pure joy outside.
Yeah. Is it a law of, of human nature that if you buy expensive plastic toys and then put them next to a rock, the child will only play with the rock? It seems to be true.
It seems to be true. Yeah. So the point is this is all very doable. Yeah. And this, this emphasis on functional fitness because it’s so grounded in something that’s true for all human beings. All human bodies is really quite straightforward.
Yeah. That’s right, that’s right. You could you could break it down. And you know, we do in our curriculum, we break it down to you can even think of it this way. Step one is, can I move my body? Well, like just in itself. Step two is can I move it? Well, if I introduce resistance and gravity is the best form of resistance, so can I hang, can I pull, can I climb? You know, those, these are the kind of the fundamental movements. And then the third step. And by the way, we’re talking now, we’re halfway through the year. Just the third step is so I can now control my body well and I can control it in space, you know, with gravity as a, as a factor. Now, can I do stuff with it in the real world? Um, so now now we introduce obstacles and different kinds of challenges that one might encounter with the body in space. And then the last step would be maybe, you know, in our, in our program, the last step is we, that’s as close as we get to introducing any kind of specialization. Um, you know, the return on investment, uh, on Just running in a straight line at a steady pace for the time is not super high. But I do think everyone should know that particular kind of pain that you endure through. And I’ve been running now for, you know, whatever, whatever the threshold is, depending on your age. But like, if you get beyond four minutes of most kinds of running, all of a sudden it becomes uncomfortable. And maybe there are like fitness nuts out there who are hearing me and be like, this guy needs to run more. So running is first of all, it is fundamental and functional, but then also like it’s a great, great encounter with the virtue of perseverance to, to, you know, can you fill the unforgiving minute with 60s worth of distance run. That’s the Kipling poem. There is something fundamental about that confrontation with one’s self and the desire to quit. Yeah. So anyway, the point is, it is simple. You know, those are like the steps. Those are that’s that’s what a functional body looks like. And then ideally, if you’ve trained that for for several years, those students are going to graduate knowing how to train that and how to maintain a body that’s capable of doing the things the body needs to do in space, given a variety of different kind of scenarios that it might encounter.
Yeah, we didn’t say this earlier, but we should have if you if you are if you have experience with uncomfortable physical tasks, then the work of doing hard things becomes possible for you to imagine.
That’s right. It’s I one of the things that I’ll say is I, I think this and I, you know, I’m not I’m not a philosopher. So I don’t know if I could defend this. Uh, I think, uh, phys pe is often is the premier training ground for the virtues or for character. Yeah. And it’s and it’s not the final one. It’s the premier.
It’s the first. Yeah. Um, it’s in a way it’s because it’s the easiest to create the conditions there. Yeah. Um, you know, it’s easy actually to become uncomfortable. You know, I just earlier today I was doing a wall sit and it.
Horrible. It’s, it doesn’t take long to all of a sudden be right in there with your character looking it in the eye and saying, what are we going to do about this? Uh, and then later in life and you’ll be in all sorts, or maybe later in the same day, you’ll be in the classroom wanting to quit while you’re looking at some whatever math problem or some something that that’s taking you to town. Yeah. It’s the same virtue.
That confronts you. This year, I was teaching Aristotle’s Ethics to the 11th graders at Hillsdale Academy, and one of the great things about that school is almost all of the kids participate in sports, and almost all of them participate in fine arts of some sort. Yeah. And so we’re going over what is habituation? Yeah. And why is it that if you if you do a repeated action, how is it that it sort of takes root in you, right? And why is it so important that the first time you do something new, you do it properly, right? What effect does that have on you? And that can sound kind of abstract, except they have either had to learn to be, you know, cross country runners or cello players or something, you know, something that requires cross country is not the best example. Basketball or something would be a better example, something where there’s a little bit of technique. Yeah. Like like a particular you can’t see the hand motion we’re making right now, but we’re making the same hand motion. Um, yeah. Like some kind of particular skill, like free throw, you know? Anyway, so they all, they all just immediately got that. Yeah, yeah. And I think you’re exactly right. If you’ve had this physical experience, this, this experience of practicing doing something well, and then also the experience of persevering when it’s hard physically, then you can better persevere when it’s hard mentally or emotionally or with your character.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s right. It it’s it is both ways. It gives you this preparation for encountering that different challenge in other forms. But then also when you are in that other form, experiencing that challenge, it gives you a touchstone. There’s a callback in your memory. You can recall having done this, something like this. Um, it’s a, yeah, it’s a, it’s a really. And in some ways, I would say it’s kind of a gentle introduction to the practice of the virtues. And, and I’ve seen this with, with, you know, especially in the military folks who, who are capable of demonstrating a really high level of selflessness, like really beautiful demonstration of virtues in like physical courage that if it weren’t in a physical environment, would be much harder for them to demonstrate that same level of virtue. And I think so that but and what that does is that tells me this is a starting point. This is this is where we can build from here.
Well, Patrick, if we want to learn more about your work, how do we do it?
Uh, Iliad athletics.com. Um, you can check us out. We have a lot of information about the curriculum there. Um, and, and yeah.
And you write about some of these things too, right?
I do. We, so we have a newsletter that we sent out. It’s called the Strenuous life. Um, surprise, surprise. Um, yeah, I’m kind of a sucker for, for Teddy Roosevelt. Uh, you know, there’s something about. Yeah, something about his call to kind of the rugged American, you know, anyway, um, but yeah, we have a newsletter called The Strenuous Life. You can sign up for it through our website. Um, but yeah, and I write all the time about this, I think, I think there’s, um, you know, in some sense, I, I think of it as a, a little bit of a frontier, uh, in education, not none of this is rocket science and none of it we’re doing for the first time or making up. But I do think in the 21st century, for all our incredible technologies and advances, we’re prescribing 12 year olds with Ozempic, which means we’ve lost the thread on physical education in a profound way. And so it’s very exciting for me, you know, in addition to like actually working on this. And my favorite part is, is teaching teachers and then actually coaching kids, but then the opportunity to tell that story and encourage others to kind of join the fight is, is awesome. Do it all the time.
Well, Patrick, thanks for joining me. That was great.
Katie, thanks so much for having me. This is really fun.
That was Doctor Kathleen O’Toole, associate vice president for K-12 education at Hillsdale College. And Patrick Whalen, founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics. Thank you for listening to the Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education podcast.
The post Kathleen O’Toole and Patrick Whalen on Physical Education appeared first on Hillsdale College Podcast Network.
