Against sedentary school environment: Rethinking the aims of education through physical education

Physical activity is essential for children’s current and future health, but most do not get their recommended daily 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Schools are an ideal environment for physical activity since students spend most of their waking hours at school. In this paper, we inquire into a sedentary school environment and its collateral impact on student learning in light of the school experience of Hannah. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of body and embodiment and Dewey’s theory of experience in education, the purpose of this narrative inquiry is to challenge an increasingly sedentary environment that undermines the role of body, hence providing a mis-educative experience. In so doing, we intend to raise awareness of the collateral impact of sedentary education on students and rethink the aims of education for the 21st century to foster the child as a whole embodied being. We suggest three aims of education: first, health as the foundation to develop the whole child; second, adding the fifth R, Rhythm, to Doll’s four R’s of richness, recursion, relation, and rigor; and finally, understanding what it means to be physically literate.