Victims of The System; Do You Exercise to Be Healthy?

    'I opened my eyes but I still had a high fever. My stomach was twitching as well. Skipping morning exercise that day seemed inevitable. Remembering that the school nurse doesn't deal with the morning exercise absence, I had no choice but to visit the dorm parent. To my surprise, he was not in the office. There was no way that I could prove that I was sick that day.

- Interview with an anonymous 16th waver -

    Stress is a dangerous thing to every highschool students in Korea, both physically and mentally. Their life is a series of uneasiness and anxiety, so the continuation of overwhelming stress could lead students to a serious illness as lots of scientific researches directly supports. It is a no wonder that a student who has a regular schedule with less stress has better academic achievements compared to his or her peers.

Morning exercise is one of the few things that KMLA students view with hatred. Not only because they have to get up early, but because of the stress they have to burden when they are sent to the student court in case they are absent or late for the exercise. And if you have lived in KMLA for long, you would learn the school's conservative manners which students' explanations and excuses are rarely accepted.

    Every KMLA student has to attend the morning exercise after they wake up around 6 a.m. The school wants to educate potential global leaders who could voluntarily develop physical strength because managing one's health to its highest conditions is an important ability of a leader, especially considering the long-term. But the students must rethink about the necessity of the morning exercise in order not to get brainwashed by the school. Do we actually improve our health conditions by the involuntary morning exercise which accepts no excuses? Is this a reasonable and a necessary part of the so called 'school tradition' which doesn't have the slightest chance of degrading the students' physical stability? A common, and unhesitant answer to this fundamental question is a NO. And this brings the major problem of morning exercise to the surface.

    Daily Exercise is always recommended to people of all ages. But we still have doubts whether we should still recommend it to students who are suffering from lack of sleep, and especially to the students who are sick that day. Facing the situations similar to the interview above, students feel desperate to skip the morning exercise. The body instinctively knows that exercising beyond its health conditions can seriously damage its normal functioning. But certain situations that make students to torture their body questions the school's attempt of its way of helping students to gain physical strength.

    People might point out that this situation can be improved by slightly adjusting the system. But there is a problem if such change was never made for about 10 years ever since the morning exercise started. A systematic problem of morning exercise presents itself when a sick student needs to get a skip-document. Just like from the interview at the beginning, the dorm parent and the school nurse both don’t try to protect the innocent students who are sick enough for the inevitable absence. If there was at least a single attempt to improve the current physical education, actively by the people who is in charge of the system, there would have been less people questioning the current way of morning exercise.

    But the most important reason that morning exercise is in doubt is because it has a bad influence on the student's health. CheongShim International Academy (CSIA) is a school that got rid of the morning exercise after the one year of its progress. The main reason that CSIA abolished the morning exercise was because the morning exercise affects students throughout their daily acts. So they changed the morning exercise system into a short time for body-stretching and massaging each others' shoulders and arms, and made its Tae-kkon-do class to be included in its regular after-noon course for students' concentration on the class. KMLA must realize that if the school administration doesn't acknowledge the possibility of such adaptations, it is hard for its students to actively cooperate on the things that the school is trying to make progress.

    But rather finding the alternatives, the school is trying to make its morning exercise more demanding after the incident that several female students fell down during the morning assembly period. The principal and the P.E. teachers say that the lack of fundamental physical strength is the reason that the girls have lost consciousness. Considering that no one in the history of CSIA has fallen during the morning assembly, it is normal for the KMLA students to question whether it is only the problem of physical strength that such situation happened. Does the school want more students to lose consciousness by Monday morning sickness? If not, it should reconsider the continuation of its unnecessary, health-consuming morning exercising period.