Shropshire Star comment: Exercise no longer in vogue

Use it or lose it, goes up the cry. And the answer is to lose it. So the sports centres start to fade away, in the same way pubs declined, and village shops and village schools were sent into retreat.

Future social historians will look to the way the children of 2018 had grown up as a likely cause. They had grown up in an increasingly static world in which the idea of having some “get up and go” was replaced by the advantages of “sit down and wait.”

MORE:

• Crisis of couch potato children: Eight out of 10 in Shropshire 'failing to exercise enough'

Order your pizza and have it delivered to your door. Chat with your pals online or by text. And if by chance you don’t shop online and are instead drawn to one of the charity shops now populating the High Street, there are always plenty of fast food outlets round about in case you get peckish.

We would venture to suggest that based on the way things are going, this vision for the future will be rather more accurate than some of the economic forecasts we get for many years hence.

We are not witnessing the seeds of the problem. We are seeing the problem take deep root. A survey by Sport England suggests that children between the ages of five and 16 are doing hardly any exercise a day, and the exercise they do do falls far short of the amount recommended in guidelines for a reasonably healthy lifestyle.

Children are glued to screens by so-called social media. Parents are complicit, with good intentions, by giving children lifts to school.

It is easy to say that today’s children should do more exercise, but it may prove harder to get them out of sedentary habits aggravated by labour-saving technologies.

Schools place a lot of emphasis on academic results, and it is by those results that they tend to be judged.

But maybe what needs to be done is promote a culture in which a sports teacher who inspires, encourages, and motivates children, and imbues in them a love of sport and exercise, receives the same amount of plaudits and kudos as a teacher who gets a class through the exams with flying colours.