For many children, PE class is one of the most enjoyable moments of the week, unless your name is Pedro De Bruyckere. A bit of movement, play, and laughter with classmates. In primary school, that feeling tends to dominate. Fun, variety, doing something together. Not coincidentally, there is less emphasis on performance and more room to simply join in.
But somewhere along the way, that changes. A recent Spanish study by Gonzalo Flores-Aguilar and colleagues, in which future teachers reflect on their own experiences with physical education, makes this shift strikingly visible. In primary school, positive emotions such as enjoyment dominate. In secondary school, that shifts to something else: more fear, more frustration, more shame.
I suspect this sounds familiar. But what makes this study interesting is that it does not get stuck on “students sometimes don’t like PE.” It exposes the source of that shift. Not a single cause, but a pattern of recurring choices.
Start with assessment. In primary school, teachers focus on participation and exploration. Later, they shift towards testing and comparison. They introduce physical tests, grades, and standards. Some students respond to that. Others drop off.
Then look at group formation. Teachers often pick teams in the same familiar way. It looks harmless, but it is not. Some students get picked first. Others wait. And wait. They learn quickly where they stand. About themselves, about others, about what counts. Fortunately, this practice is becoming less common.
And then there is visibility. PE puts students on display in a way few other subjects do. Their bodies, their performance, their mistakes are out in the open. What feels playful in primary school can turn into “failing in front of an audience” in secondary school. That shift becomes sharper as students become more self-aware.
In this way, for some students, PE changes from a place where you enjoy being to a place you would rather avoid. And that does not come without consequences. It influences how they view physical activity later on, but also, and perhaps even more interestingly, how they will teach themselves. After all, these students are future teachers.
Does this mean that the subject itself is the problem? No. On the contrary, the study also confirms the potential of PE. When lessons are varied, when there is room for collaboration, and when there is less emphasis on comparison, positive experiences remain. The problem, therefore, does not lie in what PE can be, but in how it is sometimes or often implemented.
At the same time, some caution is necessary. This is not a large-scale effect study. It involves a relatively small group of students, only women by the way, looking back retrospectively on their school days. That means: no hard causality, no generalisation to all contexts.
But that does not make the research any less relevant. On the contrary. This type of qualitative study does something that large datasets often cannot: it reveals mechanisms. It makes visible how concrete practices, assessment, grouping, and choosing activities together form an experience. Not abstract “effects,” but recognisable situations from the classroom.
We have long known that motivation, self-image, and participation in physical activity are unevenly distributed. What studies like this add is a better understanding of how this arises. Not from a single wrong choice, but from an accumulation of small, often well-intentioned decisions. The change in how students view PE is not solely within the students themselves. It is also in the way we organise the subject.
Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/students-practicing-with-volleyball-balls-15149190/