There is significant evidence to suggest that children are leading increasingly sedentary lives both at home and at school, but the drive for more physical activity in the early years stems more from a medical direction than from education.
In his Ted Talk on creativity in education (2006), Sir Ken Robinson makes the comment, ‘What happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.’
This mind/body split seems to have a been a feature of education since Descartes famously announced, ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cited in Thom et al 2015), implying that the mind was all-important and the material body merely something to take control of and rise above. Through the educational ages, while our minds have been tutored, our physical bodies have been drilled through PT exercises and trained in PE and sports lessons, with opportunities to run about freely being confined to ‘playtime’ and lunch breaks.
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