Completely agreed with you there. That said, when I was 16/17, our school let us choose between a few activities (ball sport, racket sport, running sport or "other" - gymnastics, swimming, rowing, archery, horse riding). Had I had those options rather than just soccer aged 7 instead of 17, I would likely have been far more active in the years in between.

We were given a similar choice at that age (in Germany).

Due to all my previous negative experience, I chose to sort-of-quit PE altogether. It was impossible to actually quit, but you could compensate it with an equal amount of extra credit, so I happily replaced it with Arts credit.

Surprisingly, no one as much as batted an eyelid at that. The snobby attitude of "who needs PE anyway" was certainly prevalent in my age group.

There were three camps in my school - the "soccer is our life" group, the "who needs PE anyway" and the "I've got to go for a 10k run for my extra curricular sport anyway, might as well do it during school time" group. PE for 3 years just saved me having to do a run before school that day.

Physical exercise is an extremely positive adjunct to education, like providing healthy food, useful facilities (eg buildings).

Workspaces aren't educative, of themselves, but they're a pretty important facet of running a school.

I guess YMMV, because at my school (a long time ago) we learned a new sport each term. And it took the better part of the term for the average kid to achieve some level of competency, much like an academic subject. It's certainly different in nature than academics, but you still need to "educate" your brain to arrive at the correct movement, timing and balance for any sport.

I've moved past my bitter feelings about the failings of my sports education.

It feels like PE was 2-3 years of gymnastics followed by 6-7 years of "let's just play basketball/volleyball/soccer" with a semester of swimming here-and-there. Certainly no instructions or structure to any of it.

As a fat kid, I was always the happiest when sitting out entirely (or swimming, where it turns out natural buoyancy is actually helpful).

Always getting Ds and Fs and being chosen last for any team activity led to me spend my college years on the couch.

Only through getting back pain and posture problems I found out 5 years later that I enjoy jogging and yoga and weightlifting and isometric exercise - if properly instructed.

It feels like I missed out on the years in between simply because PE at school never had the goal of helping kids be healthy - just keeping them busy in any way possible.

If I had to guess, I'd bet that the majority of kids were happy to kick a football around, and the 2-3 that woild be happy doing something else (i.e us) were just outnumbered. As a teacher, would you rather have 2-3 kids complaining about soccer or 15 kids complaining about yoga because they've never done it?

This was at a school with 7 years of compulsory Latin lessons. It would, in fact, be very much in line with the general syllabus to make students do stuff (Yoga, Latin) which they didn't appreciate for their primary effect (flexibility/muscular health, general language understanding) until years later.