By Kim Tae-jong
Educational authorities Friday said they have designated Saturdays as “Sports Days” at primary and secondary schools to encourage more physical activity, prior to the full implementation of a five-day school week next year.
“We will encourage students to join various sports clubs offered at their school where they can voluntarily enjoy sports every Saturday,” an official from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said. “Students from different schools will also compete with each other in a national-level contest, too.”
The ministry will hold the first sports event, which 6,200 students from 500 schools in seven different regions will participate in this weekend, he said.
The move is part of efforts to provide students with a supplementary program on Saturdays as a five-day school week starts next year. At present, students have five-day school weeks twice a month.
For various sports-related programs during “Sports Day,” the ministry will increase the number of physical education teachers and instructors to about 8,000 from the current 1,800.
The program is also in line with calls to increase physical education for students, whose physical strength has dwindled over the past decades.
Students have to go through a physical-fitness test, and, according to the ministry, elementary students in levels 1 and 2 with the best result listed in five levels, stood at 30.6 percent, a 10-percentage-point drop from 2000.
The drop was also distinct in high school students as seniors are in the process of preparing for the state-run College Scholastic Ability Test. Those in level 1 stood at 16.1 percent, a drop from 20.5 percent in 2001 while those in level 5 increased to 19.2 percent from 11.3 percent.