Was Physical Education Communist in the Early 1960's?

In today’s society, physical education is seen as a blow off class but during the height of the cold war, it was just the opposite. PE was more like a military boot camp. Before John F. Kennedy even came into office, he was an advocate for an increase in fitness for Americans. It also seems like a coincidence that this huge push in fitness came during a time when massive warfare could break out at any minute. A great example of this was the PE curriculum for La Sierra High School in California. 

Endorsed by President Kennedy, the workout regimen that the students of La Sierra high school went through was far more advanced that that of the Army’s physical fitness test.  In 1959, According to the Historical Review and Analysis of Army Physical Readiness and Training Assessment by Whitfield B. East, “The PCPT (Physical Combat Proficiency Test) events were (including minimum performance time/score): 40 yard low crawl (36 sec), horizontal ladder (number of rungs in one minute-36), dodge, run and jump (agility run-26.5 sec), grenade throw (15 pts) and a one mile run (8:30). The PCPT was mandatory for basic combat training and generally used to assess combat readiness for most soldiers". Pictured below is the workout for the lowest level, white team, and the highest level for the La Sierra program, the blue team.

La Sierra "White Team" Workout

La Sierra "Blue Team" Workout

The reason that JFK could have been advocating such an increase in physical education was that he wanted to begin training high school students to be soldiers. “Incoming cadets possess less physical ability than they did twenty or thirty years ago, and the time allotted for developing physical ability in these cadets has gradually been reduced-31% since 1945. At the same time, it is apparent that the officer of today and tomorrow will need more physical coordination, strength, and stamina than his predecessor” (East 129). A solution for this problem? Make future soldiers stronger by increased physical activity in PE class.

Training students for the military through physical education was smart idea at the time considering the US and the Soviet Union were extremely close to starting World War III. Although this may have been a genius idea to train students across the country to be able to fulfill their patriotic duties to the best of their abilities, they were not the only ones to think of this idea. In fact, none other that the Soviet Union were doing the exact same thing. “Much of the accomplishment of Soviet physical education and sport should be attributed to the rating systems of the AH-Union Sport Classification and GTO ("Gotov k trudu i oborone", or Ready for Labour and Defence). The GTO system's purposes are to encourage sport in the everyday life of the Soviet people, to enhance military preparedness, to teach civic defence, and to improve personal hygiene”.

 In Physical Education in the Soviet Union by Victor Zilberman, “The GTO was created to increase mass involvement in sports, and to provide the requirements for physical education in the general school as well as the physical exercise programs for the military and for collectives in rural and urban areas” (69).  JFK’s agenda to increase and secretly train students for war is a communist idea that was well received by Americans that were totally against communism.

-Michael Brown                    

For the full La Sierra High School PE handbook click HERE