MORE TIME FOR GAMES

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17640, 2 December 1931, Page 3

MORE TIME FOR GAMES

LORD DAWSON WOULD ABOLISH DRILL LONDON, Oct. 22. A plea for properly conceived physical education—“not the old mechanical souldestroying drill”—was made by Lord Dawson of Penn when he opened n. new sanatorium at Epsom College recently. It is tlie first school sanatorium elected since the memorandum dealing with public, school sanatoria was issued by the .Ministry of Health, has cost, £24.000. and is regarded as a model of its kind. Observing that it was fitting that a school with so many medical associations should set a high standard in its provisions for health. Lord Dawson said : ‘T am afraid we must own that in too many schools physical education just stumbles along, and, if 1 may say so with respect, there are some headmasters who have not even begun to understand what physical education stands for.

“Instead of a few odd hours grudgingly conceded, physical culture should occupy a definite place in the ordinary curriculum. Far from diminishing the importance of games and sport, it would then onhanco the value and enjoyment of both.”

Medical officers .of schools, he added, should study physical education in being and its reactions on different boys, in this way the trained eye would delect, at an early stage and without formal examination defects of frame and function when those could be easily rectified, for the yeal timo to study a bov was in movement. In these days, reduction of public expenditure had become a stern necessity, and lie suggested that the education of youth should take priority, for on its youth England would depend for regaining its powers of stable prosperity and happy citizenship.