Ball 5

Author: Justin Golenbock

To return to the roots of physical education in western society:

In Ancient Sparta, young boys were required to attend six hours of physical training a day until their eighteenth birthday, in mind of the mandatory military service upon reaching that date. In the neighbor city-state Athens, these same boys were only required to participate in about an hour a day of athletic training (as well as their training in the bedrooms of older men), as opposed to military training. And so the ideals of physical health and fitness began, and were eventually passed on through all the epochs of western civilization.

Fast forward: anonymous Middlebury student "N" Sullivan (no, that's too obvious…Niall "S") confides to the College's own investigative reporter "J" Golenbock that he met his physical education requirement by attending the first 45 minutes of the meeting for snow fort building. Meanwhile, this self-same investigative reporter and protagonist-in-his-own-mind is stuck finishing 13 weekend hours of First Aid and CPR, as a last resort to keep from not graduating.

Let's not forget the $45 registration fee to enter the course. Seriously. I mean, this College is not that expensive - it's not as if tuition has risen nearly 20 percent in the last four years. But snow fort building??? This is a graduation requirement that ranks up there with, say, the need to take at least one literature course...

To be fair, the physical education requirement at Middlebury was designed with the best long-term interests of its young adults at heart: "the physical education program concentrates on lifetime sports, so that all students leave Middlebury College with exposure to sports or recreational activities in which they have developed a degree of skill and interest, which will be an asset to them in later years," the school's Web page cites. And so there are many different skills and interests to choose from. I mean, it probably feels pretty rewarding to spend four years training three hours a day for the varsity sport of your choice, and then to be told you still need to take six hours of J-Term fencing to complete your "lifetime sports" training. Or aerobic pool dancing. Or chess management. What ways for students to keep the pounds off while still keeping their busy schedules geared toward graduating!

Middlebury College was founded upon the principles of a liberal arts education and physical education is an essential piece of that esoteric puzzle. You can't have fat philosophers and philanthropists, right? Without the PE requirement, would our gym get any use at all? It would not, no more than my sense of irony would. But let's keep perspective here. Because remember, next time you pause to weigh the pro and con effects of the fitness obsession upon this campus, comfortably know that somewhere, someone's getting to avoid it all. By building snow forts. 45 minutes a winter.