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The story
Following an article on “hating sports” published by Daily Shincho on October 4, reactions poured in on 5ch’s Geisports Sokuho+ board over the phrase “PE class is a public execution.” Posters swapped stories of dreading specific moments — dodgeball, swimming, the back-hip circle on the bar — while others pushed back, arguing “it’s not just PE; you can be humiliated in music, art, and academics too.” The debate split along a central fault line: is this a problem unique to PE, or a problem with education as a whole? Some pointed out that PE grades affect the internal assessment scores used for high school admissions, while others raised the contradiction that athletic ability is treated as genetic while academic performance is treated as a matter of effort — pushing the discussion toward the education system itself.
Daily Shincho, 10/4
They call it “sports season” in autumn, but there must be no shortage of people who hate sports. For them, this might just be the start of a dreary season. But is “hating sports” really such a bad thing?
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Source: dailyshincho.jp / Original article here
What people said
Seriously, dance class makes no sense to me.
Dance in class builds basic fitness and improves social skills too. If anything, they should push it more.
Same for music too.
Why'd you think PE was the only one that's different?
Exactly.
Same for art class.
PE class basically ranks everyone outright and posts the scores for all to see, pitting the "bottom tier" against each other.
If you've got any normal sense of empathy, it's awkward even being on the "can-do" side.
I hated singing in front of people.
If you're bad at it, fine, just let that be fine — why not just build that into how it's taught?
Yeah, screaming "you noob!" at people and stuff, lol
You'd never see a math teacher publicly call out and mock a kid for bad test scores, but in PE that happens.
It's the same everywhere though. In regular class they call on kids who don't know the answer and embarrass them, in music they make the tone-deaf kid sing and embarrass them, in arts and crafts they make you show off some weird thing you made and embarrass you.
There's no sport as violent and exclusionary as that.
*Dodgeball.
Maybe it depends on the teacher, but across elementary, middle, and high school, I barely remember getting actual technical instruction in almost any sport.
Swimming, maybe?
"Run to the finish with guts and spirit!" — that's about the extent of it, right?
In elementary school, PE should have dedicated specialist teachers like music class does, especially for swimming.
Middle and high school PE teachers barely teach properly either, so I doubt bringing in specialists at the elementary level would even help.
The whole teaching method for PE needs to change.
For the tone-deaf, music class is hell.
Can't draw? Art class.
Not sure if they still do it, but New Year's calligraphy practice (kakizome) too.
And of course regular subjects are the same.
Being tone-deaf even affects your English pronunciation.
Music's pretty close to it, yeah.
But being made to sing solo in front of everyone only happens once a year, if that.
I get the feeling completely.
Oh yeah, I knew a guy like that — great at every sport but couldn't swim. Always front and center, except during pool days when he'd just vanish into the background, lol
If anything, kids are the ones who feel that "on display" feeling the most. Like everyone's been saying, it's not just PE — schoolwork and music too.
Which is basically how this turned into grown-ups arguing about grown-up stuff.
Thing is, for high school admissions your PE, art, and music grades can get weighted more heavily than your test scores. I had to settle for a lower-ranked high school because of that.
I've basically never seen anyone return a serve properly except kids who already play on a team.
It's just serve, point over.
Wait, what? You mean the volleyball club kids were busting out jump serves every time?
In PE volleyball it's usually just amateur lob serves that are easy to return, and even the athletic guys usually don't have much actual volleyball experience, so I didn't think the skill gap was that big.
Then again, there's also the pattern where the serve clips the net or sails out of bounds and you just hand the other team a free point.
Plenty of people can't even land that lob serve in the first place, and even when you can return it, it's basically just batting it straight back. You really think there are that many people who can receive, set, and spike properly without being on the volleyball team?
Sports, music, and art are all about talent, so why is academics the one thing people think you can just power through with effort?
Probably because if you say outright that ability is genetic, you get accused of racism or whatever.
Also, in Japan's case, the system favors people with solid average ability across the board rather than cultivating people who are exceptionally gifted.
Period.
I thought art class was so dumb I'd just kick my projects around and toss them aside, lol
And I still got a 4 out of 5 just from the art history test.
This is with not having made a single decent piece of actual art, lmao
I'm pretty sure I only learned to swim because we had swim class.
We had pool class at school, but I don't actually remember being taught how to swim there.
I learned at a swim school instead.
I remember the swim instruction at my school being terrible.
No comparison to a proper swim school.
Same with basketball and stuff — it shouldn't be taught by some teacher who just happened to play it or only knows it from PE class. You need an actual qualified coach.
They'd yell "why can't you do it?!" — how would I know? If I knew, I'd already be doing it.
PE teachers are, obviously, people who loved PE themselves, so naturally they've got nothing to teach a kid who "couldn't do anything from the start" — and since they already looked down on those kids to begin with, they never had much motivation to actually teach them anyway.
They rounded up just the kids who couldn't do it — after school, I think, or during free periods — and made us practice over and over, about 5 of us.
Looking back, it's a mystery why the teacher was so obsessed with the back-hip circle specifically.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRqc6VJbYAAi3qw.jpg
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In many regions, Japan’s public high school entrance exams factor in not just the academic test score but also the junior high “naishinten” internal assessment (grades across all subjects), which means PE, music, and art grades feed directly into which high school a student can get into. That’s the system behind the thread comment about having “to settle for a lower-ranked high school because of PE grades.” The debate split between those who see this as a problem unique to PE and those who argued that “music and schoolwork carry that same sense of being put on display” — though both sides shared frustration with PE teachers’ lack of teaching skill. Some argued athletic ability is purely genetic, but the thread never actually examined the relative weight of effort versus environmental factors, so it’s worth noting no definitive conclusion was reached.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Geisports Sokuho+) thread ““For the Athletically Challenged, PE Class Is a ‘Public Execution’” — The Flaws in Japanese Education That Breed a Hatred of Sports.”
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