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Obviously the average man is much stronger than the average woman, and elite female athletes cannot compete at all against elite male athletes, but I think you and a few posters here are exaggerating the disparity because there’s no way the “slow boys” can compete with actual athletic women.
When I was forced to play basketball in high school PE class, there were some girls who played with the boys, and I can tell you from first hand experience, a clumsy autistic nerd who’s just getting into shape absolutely cannot just move a 5’10 elite female athlete with broader shoulders than him.
Like, I was in OK-ish shape and could do a 5k in 21min, and there were girls who did it in 17mim. Sure, there were boys who could do it in 15min, and most girls did it in 25min or more, but I didn’t stop to think about the statistical distributions, I just saw that there were both boys and girls way ahead of me.
Just look at female athlete records in any sport, compared to the mean or even advanced male performance.
The existence of such a person is a failure of the public schools.
I agree with you with regards to comparing elite female athletes with average guys. But the fact is almost no high school has even one such elite female athlete. Under a proper physical fitness regimen, if the school held a 1v1 tug of war competition girls would win against guys like 5% of the time. That there are so many weak and feeble men is a choice propagated by the system that not only doesn't prioritize physical fitness, it actively discourages it for all but the top percentages. That is why you have guys thinking girls can beat them at things. Because those 20% are working out everyday while he eats potato chips and does nothing. If he merely did 20 minutes of running and 20 minutes of lifting every other day he'd instantly be in the top 5% of females.
I am by no means an elite athlete. That said, I once faced a girl who would go on to be an Olympian in a 1v1 match. I won. It was not close. I wasn't even fully into puberty at the time. I was embarrassed by the existence of the match.
The fact is, if you are losing to girls as a guy in basically every sport but super long distance swimming they are substantially outworking you. If you told George Washington that his country would be dominated by places of child education wherein the average kid just sits all day and cant run a 2 mile sprint to notify the neighbor you need some butter for a pie, he'd be appalled. Movement is the solution. It is, of course, pain as well. But pain is weakness leaving the body.
I am not from US so take it with the grain of salt(still underlying school system is basically the same in Europe and America), but most people who fit description of "clumsy autistic nerd" didn't end up with zero physical abilities because of the teachers or school program but out of their own volition. They just didn't like to play the games that everybody played, and they didn't have a spirit of competition that would motivate them to give their all to running the distance or doing pull ups. And your only means of forcing them is through grading but they also often don't care about it(or care enough to raise enough stink to get themselves an exception or just transfer to a different school without such constraints).
Yes that is true. It should not be an option though. School PE should resemble an R. Lee Ermy boot camp at the start of each school day and failure to participate would be treated with latrine duty instead of being able to go to other classes.
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Eh, when talking about specifically "autistic nerds" (i.e. like 1% of the population), there are certain caveats on that. Autists typically have retarded* co-ordination, and the top end of the "nerds" (i.e. aspie savants) sometimes get accelerated. A 13-year-old boy with garbage co-ordination against a 14-year-old girl isn't such an uneven match.
*I use this word precisely; adult co-ordination is usually normal, but it takes longer to get there.
Too much of this problem is derived from the coddling of your "autistic nerds" being allowed to sit out gym glass, walk the track, etc instead of having to do pull ups, push ups, and windsprints every day. School PE should mirror boot camp in most respects with a bit of additional recreational sports added in.
People should get to be agentic rather than being forced into activities. (Not that I am against promoting physical activity in society).
We are talking about children. They are already being forced to go to school. I am merely advocating that the time spent there be productive.
I can understand why you are advocating for what you are advocating for. But it is a very let's try to add something to a badly run system argument, when the whole system needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from scratch.
I don't think ending the K-12 system is happening anytime soon, I do support all sorts of efforts to reduce its scope such as vouchers and the enabling of homeschoolers. But, if I were a governor or even merely on a school board, I would be pursuing measures to make my children healthier. And that would mean starting school with a vigorous, non-optional, PE curriculum.
With AI, I think we will be able to upend the current system and replace it with a newer better one.
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And kids should be forced to do certain things, wear certain things learn certain things, so that as adults they have the agency to make choices for themselves about how they want to live.
Letting a kid get through high school with no physical activity is decreasing rather than increasing their agency. It's putting them on a path of laziness, sedentary sloth, and identity formation against athletics.
Forcing a kid to practice athletics when young increases their agency as adults. They can continue to their athletic practice or choose to be a fat slob or choose to try a new sport and it will be easier as a result of their experience.
I don't think it is forcing kids to do things that makes them agentic per se, as opposed to exposing them to different things and having an environment that ensures they engage in various healthy activities. Forcing people typically tends to do the opposite, it raises them to be conformative (unless they turn rebellious as a result of being forced).
Note that I am not against promoting sports or physical activity for kids, I took issue with forcing people to do things in the specific way anti_dan advocated for.
I disagree, though I totally see your point and agree with it. I'm of the opinion that in the modern world, one must embrace the inevitable upper-middle-class-white-person cycle of periodically inventing a new sport ("rich climbing") so that white kids have something they can compete in. It's great to expose kids to lots of different kinds of things they can do! I often joke that Lionel Messi, in a world without soccer, would be a short Argentine mechanic with a weird ability to do things with his feet, no one would know he was one of the greatest athletes of all time. It's important to try a variety of things. But, I disagree with the idea that it should be left to chance: kids should be forced to try a variety of things.
Fundamentally where we differ is here:
The majority of great innovations come out of restrictions. Most modern American men's fashion stems from essentially three places: military uniforms, prison uniforms, or prep school/ivy league/country club dress codes. Innovations to look good while skirting those regulations lead to essentially all male fashion today.
Restrictions and constraints can exist in a system that allows freedom; they don't have to come from being forced. You simply remove the incentives and conditions that enable participation in outcomes you don't want, and introduce barriers to them, while simultaneously creating pathways and support for the outcomes you do want.
It is pretty simple, and all about system design. Kids are naturally curious and become bored if they don't do anything. You create a system where they have the option to participate in all the activities you want them to participate in (and of course you can and should encourage them to continue doing those when they become hard to promote resilience, hardwork and grit, and there are several ways of achieving this without having to use force), and at the same time just don't have the activities you don't want them to participate in (for example just don't give them internet access/electronics devices if you don't want them to be hijacked by their phone all the time). Lionel Messi became himself because he had access to soccer, and there were no competing distractions that diverted his energy away from soccer. The system was conducive to creating intrinsic passion in Lionel, which is necessary for success. It wouldn't have occurred if he was in the type of system anti_dan advocated for. I know because forced P.E. in school never motivated anyone around me into becoming better; and also because when people were allowed to do whatever they want, rather than being forced to participate in the specific activity that was chosen that day, it didn't result into them becoming lazy or growing up into someone who never does physical activity for health.
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But in the previous comment’s context, they’re already being forced into activities and have limited agency, by virtue of being in high school.
Why is promoting a culture where physical fitness is an important aspect in any way less agentic or more forced than the situation where kids already have to be at school doing things adults tell them to do?
You can have a culture that promotes physical fitness as an important aspect, but doing so in a boot camp like space and forcing them to participate in it in what a school environment typically is like currently is what I am against, because I believe it hurts more than it helps and sucks all the joy out of physical activity and sports just like school typically sucks all the joy out of maths/science and everything else you are forced to study there. Plus, schools tend to be ineffective.
I’m with you on schools being ineffective, but I think this is a side (possibly intended) effect of the last 70-80 years of school design.
School, like everything else, is effective when it is a challenge that can be meaningfully failed, when there are stakes attached to failure, and when there is a meaningful release valve, i.e., productive work for dropouts. It’s hard to say any of those three things apply to American schools in the 21st century.
In that regard, you’re right, American schools need a huge overhaul anyways, and trying to encourage physical fitness activities was already being consumed by leftism as far back as Kennedy. Any serious measures would probably fall flat on their face in the teeth of “just be kind” teacher resistance and “don’t get sued” admin resistance.
That being said…
As to having all the joy sucked out of physical activity, sorry, I say this as an obvious nerd of the sort who discovers and posts on the Motte, but not everything is supposed to be joyous. I still eat my vegetables as a middle-aged man, because it was joylessly ingrained in me by adults and is provably demonstrable in the real world that a healthy amount of vegetables is better for me than tubs of ice cream, or even my preferred all steak diet.
Physical activity is the same way. Maybe it’s just the “eating your vegetables of life” activity for the nerds, but I think “it won’t be hedonic” as an argument against something is an argument on weak footing.
I agree that not all school systems have to be ineffective, but most schools are that way globally so currently such a policy will do more harm than good.
Yes not everything has to be joyous, but physical activity doesn't have to be bad either. Kids enjoy playing, and so do adults with the right kind of physical activity and environment. It's only unpleasant when you have gone without physical activity for a long period, so initially it can be tiring and will feel bad, but that's only a result of having systems that discouraged play for kids in the first place. When you force someone to engage in something fun and also suck the joy out of it, the result can often be counterproductive for life as that person forms a bias against doing that activity (like how a lot of kids get maths anxiety, a belief that they are bad at doing it, or it's just not fun for them) in their adult life. It is important not to design systems that have this effect when you can have better systems in place. I don't think that you will disagree that almost all kids enjoy playing, sports and physical activity and engage in it naturally (infact I have never met a kid who didn't like it). You only have to design a system that allows them to continue doing that as they grow older. The problem is that modern life and school systems effectively stop kids from natural play, and then force them into ineffective P.E. classes. The fact you can observe "autistic nerds" who aren't participating in physical activity at all is a symptom that there is something wrong with the current system. There is nothing inherent in these kids that makes them dislike play/physical activity. If you look outside of western society, you will see that these type of children/teens don't have to exist, and it is not because adults have to be force them into physical activity.
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I don’t disagree that it’s appalling that physical fitness being neglected for the majority (although calling men “weak” and “feeble” as opposed to just unhealthy is an odd choice of language). It doesn’t really matter for the main point that there’s elite female athletes, but it’s still important to know that the delta is not that big at the extremes. The top female athletes are about ~10% worse than the top male ones, and if you look at something like a 5k run, the top females today are better than the top males from the 1930s. That’s way closer than most posters here would suggest, and to compete with female Olympians in most sports you’d still have to be in like the top 0.1% fittest men. The average Joe, even with a decent amount of training, doesn’t stand a chance.
But that’s getting aside from the main point. How exactly is knowing that he can easily surpass most women at sports with relatively little training supposed to dissuade the hypothetical autistic teenage boy from transitioning? If anything it might backfire and make him stop exercising altogether to match more female levels of performance/muscularity (and on estrogen, male performance is drastically reduced anyway).
I would postulate that regular exercise would probably improve the mental health of these teens to the extent that something around 99% of all the trans candidates would no longer be so. In fact, they probably wouldn't by "autistic" anymore either (because we are generally not talking about genuine autism diagnoses in this sort of hypothetical). Sound of body resulting in sound of mind is real.
I don’t want to discount the psychological and physical benefits of but come on, it won’t stop anyone from being autistic, or even trans. I wish it did! I went to the gym and I just became an autist with a six pack. And it didn’t stop me from being trans either, unfortunately.
Plenty of athletic people I know are various flavours of neurodivergent or queer. Some trans guys I know are particularly into bodybuilding and powerlifting and it uh… has the opposite effect of making them conform to the social expectations of birth sex.
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