"Taranaki Central Press" TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1937. PHYSICAL FITNESS

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 447, 1 June 1937, Page 4

"Taranaki Central Press" TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1937. PHYSICAL FITNESS

There was an interesting debate in the House of Commons recently on the Physical Training and Recreation Bill, the measure through which the Government hopes to make the people of the Mother Country a physically fit nation, but it scarcely touched the fringe of the great problem. Indeed, throughout the discussion on the physical fitness of the nation there has been a disposition to avoid what most people know to be the main issue that of compulsion. One of the impressive speeches of the debate was that in which Mr Oliver Stanley, the Minister of Education, argued in favour of a happy medium between the British system of games and the Continental ideas of physical training. One point that he made, of interest to New Zealanders, was that mere physical training tended to become dull, whereas ihe competitive spirit in games gave some spice to exercise. H» contrasted the development in such countries as Sweden and Cechoslovakia, where attention was concentrated on the physical condition of the individual, with that in England, where the concentration on games had directed attention particularly to team work, and he pointed out, very properly, that in a highly urbanised state the attention to games tended to convert young men from participants into spectators. And this, of course, is precisely the evil that has come over England, where the great masses of people are content to do their bit toward making a fitter England by looking on at an afternoon contest. i The problem for a country like New Zealand is to find means of keeping men fit until the age of forty or over. They abandon strenuous games for the most part at the age of twenty-five or even earlier, and thereafter become spectators. Of course, many young men take no systematic physical exercise at all after they leave school, and the signs of slackness in their case are apparent within a very few years. The problem is to develop the habit of regular exercise in all youths and to maintain it. And it becomes more and more, important under modern conditions that tend always to increase leisure. Mr Stanley was disposed to argue that civilisations of Ihe past came to grief because they failed to utilise leisure intelligently, and he left his hearers to draw the conclusion that the British civilisation would fa;l similarly unless the people could be taught how to use their leisure and unless facilities were provided for them. Recreation, games and physical training obviously must have their place. For the present the Government proposes to encourage voluntary physical training of the individual, but no one seriously contends that this can be the ultimate solution of a very grave problem.