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Yoga
Yoga has been an integral part of Health and Physical
Education that has been a compulsory subject up to the secondary school stage
since 1988. The NCF 2005 adopted a holistic definition of health in which yoga
is an integral part of it.
Both yoga and physical education contribute to not merely the physical
development of the child but have a positive impact on psychosocial and mental
development as well. Playing group games have a positive impact on individual
self esteem, promotes better interaction among children, imparts values of
co-operation, sharing and to deal with both victory and defeat. Similarly yoga
practice contributes to the overall development of the child and various studies
have shown that it contributes to flexibility and muscular fitness and also
corrects postural defects among school children.
There is also a growing realization that the health needs of adolescents,
particularly their reproductive and sexual health needs, require to be
addressed. Since these needs predominantly relate to sex and sexuality, which is
culturally a very sensitive area, they are deprived of opportunities to get
appropriate information. There is a need to provide children accurate and
authentic information and help them to construct knowledge and acquire life
skills, so that they cope up with the concerns related to the process of growing
up, counter stress and strains and cope up with examination stress.
Within this overall framework both yoga and physical education are seen as
routes for achieving overall development of children.
However, up till now both yoga and physical education have not been given the
due importance and neither has their contribution to the health and overall
development of the child been adequately acknowledged. The constraints faced by
yoga and physical education are related to a number of factors that affect the
quality of school education in general and health and physical education in
particular. This is the right time for making health and physical education to
be considered as one of the important components of introduction of yoga in
schools. In order to make this subject as a subject at par with other subjects
of school education, the project can help in advocating the area of health and
physical education to be treated not merely an instructive area but also having
strong experiential learning component. The project, therefore, should focus on
preparing/training teachers in yoga focusing on the comprehensiveness of the
area of health and physical education.
