A lecturer during our programme evaluation remarked that PE department heads and teachers have been lamenting that the game skills of the current generation of PE teachers are inferior compared to others in the past. I think this generalisation is pretty true, and I think game skills of future teachers will be around our current cohort's standards too, except for the rare few individuals who are all-rounders and can play different games confidently. Why is this the case?
Singaporean youths do not have time to play
Not many parents are willing to let their kids engage in fun and games on their own with their peers ever since the education system demands that students get good results throughout their schooling life. I think even free time is now structured by the parents, who want their kids to engage in more 'productive' activities like learning some skills formally.
Lack of supportive social environment
Kids do not have the strong support of parents to play after school hours usually, and I think it is hard for them to find peers who can stay back outside of schooling time to play too. It is rare to find schools that actively encourages students to engage in games within the school compound, with many wanting to shoo the kids home. When they are home, it is rare to find parents who have the time and desire to get their kids to be active.
Lack of facilities
Living in densely populated estates makes it hard for people to find space to engage in field games for example. Sport halls booking slots are packed at peak periods, that's what I know.
Early specialisation of skills
Sports people are cultivated mainly due to their involvement with CCAs in schools, which makes them specialists in a particular sport. Unless they find opportunities outside of school to play, that'll probably be the only thing they are good at. It is difficult to acquire excellent skills when new sporting interests are picked up later in life when they are already independent adults.
Although I believe that successful lessons are almost wholly the result of excellent planning and good management skills, PE teachers should ideally have adequate skills to play different games at an intermediate level. Otherwise it can be sad that we cannot inspire students to be all-rounders by showing them how we enjoy all the different things sports have to offer.
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I think that there is a prevalent practise of elitism in the school sports CCAs. Since every coach only wants the best for his/her own sport, that deprives most students the opportunity to be exposed to various forms of sports simply because they do not make the cut. The system ignores the fact that there maybe late bloomers and that students really need to be exposed to as many things as possible to find out which area is really their forte. This is really a vicious cycle since most schools just want their sports groups to win back medals for their schools, so students who are not fast enough don't really stand any chance of getting into the sports group in the first place. There is no such thing as a holistic approach to the teaching of sports, none that I've witnessed so far. And if this is the case, what more can we say when teachers are found to be less skilled these days when they themselves weren't even given the exposure? There is no address made to the root of the problem.
Well the fact is that most kids onloy can have one CCA la, and no one wants more than that. By right, PE teachers should be the ones to expose kids to different sports, but that is only possible if the school's PE dept have a holistic scheme of work that is well-planned and rigorously adhered too.
Ultimately, even if the kids have exposure to different games in PE classes, they still lack the supportive environment for them to sustain and develop their interests further.
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