Olympic Education

An international review

Roland Naul, Deanna Binder, Antonin Rychtecky, Ian Culpan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781136476112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

A fundamental component of the Olympic ideal is the concept of Olympic education. This is the notion that sport can help children and young people develop essential life skills. Olympic Education: An international review is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of the diffusion and implementation of Olympic education programmes around the world.

The book includes 28 chapters with 21 national case studies of countries on every major continent, including Australia, Brasil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Spain, the UK, the US and Zambia. Each chapter examines the cultural, pedagogical, political and societal challenges of teaching Olympic education, as well as the national, individual and institutional programmes that have emerged. It explores key practical and conceptual issues, such as the incorporation of Olympic values in PE curricula, sport coaching and coach education programmes, while also taking into account the collaborative efforts of the governmental bodies, sport federations and Olympic institutions responsible for policy and implementation.

This is important reading for all students, researchers and professionals with an interest in the Olympics, sport education, sports coaching, sport policy or physical education.

Part 1

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History and development of Olympic education

Roland Naul, Deanna Binder and Antonín Rychtecký

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Part 1 outlines the evolution of Olympic education within the historical context of the modern Olympic Movement, including the initiatives promoted by the International Olympic Committee and other international organizations. Its initial roots are deeply embedded in the work and writings of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. The revised version of the Olympic Charter offers a somewhat more expanded framework for the concept of Olympic education. More recently the field incorporates contemporary pedagogical concepts which focus on diversity, eco-responsibility, constructivism and interdisciplinary curricula. In this section the topic of Olympic education will be elaborated in three chapters: Chapter 1 will explore Olympic education through the lens of the writings of Pierre de Coubertin; Chapter 2 will outline the efforts and initiatives of the International Olympic Committee to promote the mandate of the Olympic Movement for Olympic education; Chapter 3 briefly highlights other international institutions and initiatives for the promotion of Olympic education.

Chapter 1

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Historical roots of the educational ideas of Pierre de Coubertin

Roland Naul and Deanna Binder

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The modern revival of the Olympic Games in the nineteenth century was an educational project. Pierre de Coubertin, a French educational reformer, launched a campaign to have physical activity included in his nation’s educational curriculum. In this regard, his activities and writings date back to long before his successful efforts at a conference in Paris in 1894 (the Sorbonne Congress) to organize an international Olympic Games. His enthusiasm for education as a mission of his newly-established International Olympic Committee (IOC) was sustained until his resignation as the second President of the IOC in Prague 1925, and then later through his establishment of another organization to promote physical education in schools.

Coubertin’s educational ideas were inspired on the one hand by an interest in the ancient Greek’s dualistic focus on the development of body as well as mind. This orientation to athletic perfection was being thoroughly discussed by scholars as archaeologists unearthed the ruins of ancient Olympia. According to Coubertin, the ancient Greek ideas seemed to emphasize a ‘delicate balance between mind and body’ (Coubertin (1894), 2000, p. 532). On the other hand Coubertin was inspired by the educational ideas of Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) who, according to Coubertin, transformed education in England by the introduction of athletic programmes. He toured the elite schools of England and the USA, taking note of the way that the introduction of team sports became part of the curricula, not only as physical training but also as character-building activities. In travels to the UK and USA in the 1880s the young Coubertin admired much about school sports at public schools in the UK and college sports in the US (MacAloon, 1984; Guttman, 1992; Lucas, 1992; Coubertin, 2000; Wassong, 2002). Coubertin himself became a renewer of traditional school-based military gymnastics in French secondary schools in the 1880s – with applied principles of ‘athletic education’ borrowed from the English education model of Public Schools.

Not only does athletics reign over education, where it provides the teacher with an extremely powerful yet very delicate instrument for moral education, but it has also invaded the territory of the entire Empire. Today, it is everywhere.

(Coubertin (1894), 2000, p. 536)

The original version of the Olympic Charter, written by Coubertin and his IOC in 1896, listed four general aims:

1 to promote the development of those physical and moral qualities which are the basis of sport;

2 to educate young people through sport in a spirit of better understanding between each other and of friendship, thereby helping to build a better and more peaceful world;

3 to spread the Olympic principles throughout the world, thereby creating international goodwill;

4 to bring together the athletes of the world in a great four-yearly sports festival, the Olympic Games.

Thus, Coubertin and his colleagues tied the staging of the Games and the work of the IOC to educational ideas that have come to be known as ‘Olympism’. The reforms in teaching and instruction methods that Coubertin wanted are based on the idea of the unity of mind and body in the development of human beings and self-improvement through participation in sport. Fair play, friendship, peace and international goodwill belong to the list of values that are incorporated within the concept of Olympism. For Pierre de Coubertin and those who helped him establish the IOC and the modern Olympic cycle, the Olympic Games were not simply to be an athletic event, but the focal point for a broadly based social movement which, through the activity of sport and play, would enhance human development and generally make the world a better place to live (Kidd, 1985, p. 1). According to Geßmann (1992), ‘the Olympic idea cannot be understood, without an understanding of its educational mission’ (p. 33).

In his early efforts to describe his ‘Olympic education’ ideas Coubertin refers to such concepts as the ‘cult of effort’ and the ‘cult of eurhythmy’. The following quote is taken from the ‘Olympic letters’ that he wrote in Lausanne, as the IOC relocated from Paris to Switzerland following the First World War.

This Olympic pedagogy which I recently said was based at once on the cult of effort combined on the cult of eurhythmy – and consequently on the love of excess combined with the love of moderation – is not sufficiently served by being glorified before the world once every four years in the Olympic Games. It needs permanent factories. The Olympic factory for the ancient world was the gymnasium. The Olympiads have been renewed, but the gymnasium of antiquity has not – as yet. It must be.

(Olympic letter No. V, published in the Lausanne newspaper La Gazette in November 1918, in Coubertin, 2000, p. 217)

He borrowed the word ‘eurhythmy’ from an early twentieth century educational project titled ‘eurhythmics’ which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, refers to ‘a system of rhythmical physical movements to music used to teach musical understanding’. Eurhythmics evolved in the Steiner (Waldorf) schools,¹ and emphasized a pedagogy based on the role of imagination in learning and a striving to holistically integrate the intellectual, practical and artistic development of students. It is not difficult to understand why such a philosophy appealed to Coubertin, who criticized the French educational system for educating ‘walking dictionaries’. With respect to the ‘gymnasium of antiquity’, Coubertin envisioned it as a cultural site obligated to the cult of eurhythmy as a means of training body, will and mind. Analogously to the reawakening of the Olympic Games, Coubertin was interested in reawakening the gymnasium of antiquity as a modern cultural factory for the harmonious and holistic education of young people. Besides the Olympic Games, which were, for Coubertin, a promotional initiative, his ideas encompassed other permanent places of education and exercise. In the same Olympic letter quoted earlier he mentions ‘municipal institutions’ that ‘are going to play the foremost part in the world to come’ (ibid.) after the First World War. And indeed, in many European countries, schools and sports clubs in the 1920s became ‘permanent factories’ for physical activities and sport education, which had been spreading, if not eurhythmics, then the cult of effort. ‘Effort’ as a fundamental Olympic principle is today better expressed as ‘joy found in effort’; ‘eurhythmy’ remains a reference in Olympic studies to activities which promote the harmonious development of body and mind. For Coubertin these include artistic endeavours and, since the 1920s, these two principles of Coubertin have indeed become essential pillars for the purpose of Olympic education.

Coubertin himself for many years preferred terms other than Olympic education for his concepts. He uses phrases such as ‘l`education athletique’ or ‘l`education Anglaise’ or ‘l`education sportive’ or ‘la pedagogie sportive’, the title of his book (Coubertin, 1922). He himself picked up the more frequently used term ‘Olympique’ only after the First World War, and elaborated his educational labels with the term ‘Olympic’ in more detail after 1925.

Coubertin’s farewell speech to the IOC at the City Hall in Prague in May 1925, and his subsequent pedagogical endeavours after 1925 within the ‘Union pédagogique universelle’ indicate that it was the unfinished pedagogical legacy of the gymnasium of antiquity that he wanted to revive and pursue outside the IOC. He complained that he had been misunderstood about what he had hoped to achieve in setting up the Olympic Games, because there was very little interest within the IOC or international sport for his educational ideas (see Coubertin, 2000, p. 556, p. 558; Krüger, 2009).

Nonetheless, it must be said that in the mid-1920s a number of European countries had modern policies for school reform that were certainly promoting a sporting education with character-forming educational objectives. However, at that time, nobody involved with promoting youth sports in schools and sports clubs spoke about ‘Olympic pedagogy’ or ‘Olympic education’. Pierre de Coubertin himself did not develop any system or further outline what Olympic education or Olympic pedagogy meant to him. In Letter No. IV we find his famous quote:

Olympism is not a system, it is a state of mind. The most widely divergent approaches can be accommodated in it, and no race or time can hold an exclusive monopoly on it.

(Coubertin, 2000, p. 548)

If Olympism is not a system of philosophical or pedagogical assumptions, then it is hardly striking that we do not find Coubertin outlining a theoretical framework for a so-called Olympic pedagogy. In fact, Coubertin was an eclectic, drawing ideas from different educational and sport orientations to support and promote his own ideas, and these ideas transformed themselves over time. Extrapolating over the 120 years of modern Olympic history, we might also suggest that Olympism as an educational concept draws from divergent approaches which alter according to pedagogical orientations and cultural contexts. Perhaps no unique system of Olympic pedagogy can exist without embracing different approaches.

Having said this there are, in the speeches, letters and writings of Pierre de Coubertin, a number of baselines for educational endeavours within the context of the Olympic spirit. In his Olympic Letter No. III in October 1918 he outlines four major tasks of education in the context of the harmonious development of body and mind:

[…] to distinguish […] only the body and the mind, […] is too simplistic, but rather the muscles, the understanding, the character, and the conscience. This corresponds to the four-fold duty of the educator.

(Coubertin (1918), 2000, p. 547)

Thus an education that follows the principles of eurhythmy as a strategy for integrating the development of body and mind requires at least four subject areas, integrating physical, social, moral and cognitive activities through the medium of sports.

Later, in 1935, two years before Coubertin died, he suggests five principles of Olympism as an educational philosophical foundation (see Coubertin, 2000, pp. 580–3). The first and most essential principle is what he called the ‘religio-athletae’. Pierre de Coubertin considered the athletes who participate in Olympic Games as ‘ambassadors of modern education’ for civilized countries who share with each other the religious spirit of sports as a means of moral character building. It is this sporting–religious idea that should shape the athletes’ awareness. They should be the representatives of the ‘new human society’ (Coubertin, 2000, p. 580), ambassadors of the education of civilized peoples.

The second principle is based on the ‘equality’ of all human beings – that is of all athletes to pursue individual se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 History and development of Olympic education
• Part 2 The Olympic Games as a promoter of Olympic education
• Part 3 Olympic education: international country reviews
• Part 4 Olympic education around the world: a comparative analysis
• Index