Students work out before class. Click for PBS report.
“It’s all about the heart rate.” Paul Zientarski, who recreated PE at Naperville (IL) Central High School around 2008, tells us this: and when student heart rates go up in the hour before they sit down in class, their grades will follow.
In addition to the emphasis of school nutrition initiatives emerging in schools all over the country, we are seeing a new connection between physical fitness and cognition emerging at the other end of the school building.
Paul Zientarski
Naperville, IN HS
The PBS program “Need to Know” focuses on the work Zientarski accomplished in Naperville, and the research that John Ratey MD is doing at Harvard that points increasingly to the importance of physical education and fitness on the optimal function of the brain. For Zientarski, the results appeared in the academic performance of students who participated in specific exercises in the morning before class.
John A. Ratey, MD
Harvard University
Author of SPARK
Ratey, the author of the book “Spark,” comments on the research that shows morbidly obese teens may have IQs as much as 30 points lower than their peers. He also notes that “fitness-based exercise programs” of the kind available at Naperville are definitely not “gym.” The new understanding of the effect of fitness on cognition and on the formation of the brain is just beginning to be applied in school settings in part because of the pioneering work of Zientarski and others.
In an era when there has been so little availability of phys ed in schools (only 2% of high schools were providing daily physical education at the time of the video above, in 2011) the advance of illnesses arising from becoming overweight and falling out of shape are becoming too predictable. In the case of the US Army the number of recruits who are rejected because of overweight and related ill health still remains an issue: even basic training is considered insufficient to bring those candidates to readiness.
(Updated: Sept. 2017)