This weekend I re-watched the 1979 movie Breaking Away, which is even better than I remember it. 

For those who haven't had the pleasure:  in the summer after graduating from high school, four school chums bum around their hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, as the question of what to do next gradually pulls them in different directions:  towards girls, towards a life in the local limestone quarries, even--maybe--towards college, a fate which, up to now, all of them have either disavowed or given up on altogether. 

One of the kids, Dave, is a promising cyclist, obsessed with the great Italian racers.  Mid-movie, he gets a chance to race against them.  They turn out to be cheaters. 

For a while, Dave is disillusioned, but at the urging of his three friends, enters a race against the local college kids (the Little 500, still held in Bloomington to this day!). Inevitably, he wins, with a little help from his friends.  A short time later, we see that Dave is now a freshman, and is taking a tentative step towards something resembling upward mobility.

I'm leaving a lot out, of course, but one primary theme worth highlighting here is that cycling gives Dave's life structure.  Maybe he'll ride the Tour de France someday, but the movie isn't so shallow as to make us think that's what's important. Dave has learned a degree of commitment and discipline from riding, a certain willingness to set goals and follow through, and at the end of the movie, we're pretty sure he's going to make it.

I became interested in fitness outside of a sports context:  I felt small and weak and wanted to be big and strong.  But, similar to Dave, lifting weights came to have a bigger meaning for me.  Schlepping down to the basement at 5:30 in the morning every day, I took away some lessons about commitment, about making small, incremental progress towards a clear goal, and I would say that those lessons have stuck with me at least as much as the ones I was getting in class. 

The point I'm making isn't simply that sport--or physical activity of any kind--is a useful adjunct to classes, reading, and homwork.  I'd like to suggest that it's actually the same thing taught in a different context.  

Pedagogical types would say that even seemingly impractical classes are still important because they help kids learn to think, to work on something that might not come naturally until they can do it.  In short, they teach all the great lessons that are also imparted, in the physical dimension, by sport and fitness.

Not a lot of time and effort is spent by schools covering practical information about preparing taxes or cooking breakfast or hunting for bargains.  Rather, we study books like Great Expectations, in the hope that perhaps we'll apply the same kind of critical thinking towards our own life-choices that we put towards reading and analyzing Pip's.  

Similarly, knowing how to spin out of a tackle or execute a back tuck isn't as important as having worked on and mastered a particular skill, whether or not that skill helps you into a higher tax bracket as an adult.  If we concede that we aren't simply teaching survival skills in school, then sport and fitness activity becomes at least as important as any but the most practical classes in the curriculum.

Indeed, more so, because of course you are teaching kids to take care of their bodies at the same time.

I have nothing against your fancy book learnin'; I'm chock-full of the stuff myself.  But I do think that sport and fitness isn't only important for the physical health of our kids; I think it's another equally viable way to teach kids many of the very same lessons we're trying to teach them in class.

Thoughts?  Experiences?