Mores, like "scissors" is one of those nouns used only in its plural form. They're the customs, the conventions, and especially the morals agreed upon at a certain time by a certain group.

And in hindsight, they can be an absolute hoot.When I look to the 1970s to provide such amusement, I don't pull out my yearbooks and laugh at the feathered hair or the fashion faux pas created by two god-awful fabrics polyester and corduroy. Instead, I remember two school districts near mine in Berks County.Both had smoking lounges.Now these smoking lounges were not designated rooms where teachers and other adults could go to get their fix of nicotine and not affect the air breathed in by others. Oh no. These were places provided for students who were of age and had parental permission.I kid you not. As long as you were 18 and had your parents' permission, you could get out your smokes instead of your notes during study hall.While you may find this more criminal than comical, understand the mores of the time. Now it's seen as a form of child abuse if parents smoke in the same room as children, but back then millions of parents puffed away night after night as the family watched television, creating a smokey haze nearly as unhealthy as the ones found in today's tiny bars that still allow smoking.Which leads us to the point I'll ask you to ponder: What is perfectly acceptable today that will cause people 35 years from now to wonder, "What in the world were those people thinking back then?"One possibility is the way school boards which are really just mirrors of the mores of the people in their district have failed to recognize the importance of exercise. Various studies have shown that exercise during the school years is not only needed for short-term weight management and long-term health, but also academic success. Yet the amount of exercise provided by most districts is minimal at best.To understand why schools should incorporate more exercise time into any given week, consider the nine-month experiment performed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and published in the October issue of Pediatrics. The researchers created a free after-school health-and-fitness program they called FIT, Fitness Improves Thinking, and accepted half of the 222 children ages 7 to 9 who applied. The other half were placed on a waiting list and served as the control group.Those in the program were bussed after school every day to the college's campus where they immediately performed a quick bit of exercise to snap them out of their sedentary funk. That was followed by a lesson on either nutrition or exercise.The sessions ended with physical exercise in the form of games.The researchers had the subjects wear pedometers and heart rate monitors during the sessions. They discovered that the games created moderate-to-vigorous exercise and that the subjects took about 4,500 steps during each session.The 111 in the program and the 111 on the wait list also took other aerobic tests as well as cognitive tests. The tests administered at the conclusion of the nine-month program, showed a 6 percent increase in physical fitness for those in the program as opposed to a 1 percent increase in the control group.More importantly, the 111 in the exercise group recorded 100 percent more improvement in a series of cognitive tests than the wait-list group. The tests measured things like blocking out distractions, focusing on a task, and multitasking all vital skills to meet with success during the typical school day.Additionally, the researchers even found a variance in improvement in the FIT kids' group. The subjects who attended the most sessions during the nine-month study fared the best on the cognitive tests.All this caused the researchers to write that "the rapid decline in physical activity opportunities for children at school" in an attempt to cram in more academics during the school day to bolster test scores on state-mandated tests may have "unintended consequences."In other words, the conscience reduction in exercise may actually prevent what the conscience reduction is supposed to create: better test scores.But the mores of society today call for schools to be "accountable" and in Pennsylvania that near-sighted accounting primarily focuses on a single test administered over a series of days about two-thirds of the way through a school year.Furthermore, the mores of society also call for schools to be stripped-down to all but "the absolute essentials" as a way to keep taxes at bay.The not-so-humorous irony to all this is that we just may be stripping away what 35 years from now we know is absolutely essential to create academic success: a period of physical activity during most if not all school days.