En declaring that she aspires to “a school attentive to the health of the child thanks to the daily action of doctors, school nurses, and tomorrow to their physical condition, with our physical education and sports teachers [EPS] », Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, newly appointed Minister of National Education, Youth, Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, seems to reinforce the importance of the missions entrusted to PE teachers.
Extremely rare in an inauguration speech, she specifically mentions a school discipline and recognizes that it plays a crucial role in health education and in the prevention of non-communicable diseases. According to the World Health Organization (2020), a child or adolescent has a physically active lifestyle from one hour per day of moderate and intense physical activity (thirty minutes for adults and the elderly).
In France, recent studies show that only 40% of boys and 16% of girls aged 15 to 17 achieve these recommendations (Verdot et al., 2022) and that most adolescents drop out of federal extracurricular sports activities during adolescence. However, all political, scientific and professional communities agree on the need to educate people about healthy and physically active lifestyles from an early age.
In recent years, health through daily physical activity as well as the reduction of screen time and sedentary lifestyle have therefore become educational pillars of the school system, as evidenced by the recent measurement of thirty minutes of physical activity. daily in primary school.
The risk of a counterproductive effect
Focused on the assessment and promotion of physical condition (endurance, strength, speed, flexibility and coordination), the means envisaged to achieve this objective nevertheless raise questions. Although measuring the physical condition of students at school is relevant for epidemiological monitoring, it should not become a priority objective of teaching: by placing the exclusive emphasis on performance, this strategy risks reducing PE teachers to simple school physical trainers.
Fitness tests provide a snapshot of the health status of a population, they highlight a problem (young people are not active enough) but they do not identify the reasons why young people are disengaged, later, physical and sporting activities. PE teachers know the ineffectiveness of this strategy which attacks the symptoms rather than the causes.
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