Equality, Education, and Physical Education

John Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315399843
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this book, first published in 1993, John Evans presents a guideline for challenging sexism, racism and elitism in programmes of physical education. Physical education in relation to social class, gender, race and disability is also discussed. The results arising show problems in the teaching of physical education, and examines the importance of physical education in the development of the child in today's educational system. It is the intention of the contributors to help practitioners clarify their thinking on concepts and issues involved in effecting equal opportunities in physical education. In turn, it is hoped that this will lead to better formation of physical education programmes which demonstrate both equality and equity. This title will be of interest not only to teachers but to students of sociology and education.

Chapter 1

Equality, Equity and Physical Education

John Evans and Brian Davies

Politics, Slogans and Physical Education

In the UK in recent years, the discourses of educationalists and politicians of the political Left, Right and Centre have often seemed to converge on the idea that ‘equality’, ‘opportunity’, ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ are all inherently good things which should be sponsored through and expressed in the organization and content of the state education system. We would be particularly hard pressed to find a time when concepts such as these had featured so prominently in the discourse of the New Right.¹ The political message is frequently asserted that we live in an age of great consumer opportunities, in which individuals have the freedom and responsibility to create their own ‘lifestyle’, choose their own health care, their own housing, and their children’s school. The apparent convergence in the thinking of politicians across the electable spectrum has led many (failing to note the connection between the political philosophy of Fabian Socialism and the Hayekian liberalism of Thatcherism; see Burden-Teh, 1991), to lament angrily that the political Right have ‘captured their ground’, stolen or borrowed concepts that are more appropriately associated with the politics of the Left or liberal centre (see Davies et al., 1990) and wantonly redefined them in a way which has little to do with the achievement of ‘real’ equality, opportunity, or choice either in society or in schools. To be sure, in the staffroom and lobby discourse of educationalists and politicians, concepts such as equality, opportunity, freedom and choice can seem to have wings, when used in the manner described above, as popular slogans to arouse sentiment and the support of colleagues, or parents or the electorate, and to rationalize policies which forerun the implementation of educational and social change. This tendency to use slogans to define curriculum policy is not, of course, peculiar to the UK educational scene (see Werner, 1991). All dedicated engineers of the social know that the first rule of social change is to simplify both its necessity and possibility. In this sense, Thatcher’s ‘original’ slogan call for reform, TINA (there is no alternative) was generated by the even more basic and potent belief in TINN (there is nothing new). Where there is ‘nothing new’, all attempts at change tend to be seen as potentially irrational and self-defeating attacks on how things must be, and their protagonists likely to be defined as both mad and bad. This ultimate rape of social reason is capable of generating an indefinite number of instances of defence of a ‘natural’ order (in Thatcher’s case the sacred relation between shopkeeper and customer) starting from any point of privilege.

All such slogans need to be treated with interrogative caution not least because they intentionally simplify, reduce and thereby potentially obfuscate and distort the realities of the social world they purport to describe. Their meanings are conveniently transient and depend upon the specifics of social, political or fiscal interests which dominate political or educational contexts of the day. Because they derive their agendas from and are used in such contexts they are inevitably contested. Consensus over their meaning is unlikely to be achieved.

Margaret Talbot (1990) is right when she states that only once we begin to interrogate concepts such as equality does it become clear that people attach very different meanings to these terms and that these ‘interpretations’ can and do significantly effect the way in which the education system (and PE within it) is perceived and structured. It is for this reason that struggles over the language of education, over the meaning of the concepts which reside in the ‘official discourse’ (which defines what is to count as valid knowledge in PE and as culturally legitimate conceptions of the body, the individual, social order and society) are so important and as necessary and difficult to engage in as any contest over more practical or material matters such as the distribution of resources in schools. Beneath the rhetoric of these popular slogans lie deeply held values and conceptions of what individuals and society are and how they ought to be. It is their elaboration in policy and overall resource decisions which disposes of what counts as a level playing field upon which we make our marks.

Our task in this chapter is neither to command nor offer a consensus view on what is meant by equality in education. Our own perspectives and choice of company in this volume are informed by our value commitments to the politics and philosophies of democratic socialism. We reject Thatcher’s selfish, now Major’s putatively ‘caring’, materialistic individualism for the sort of democratic individualism which Leadbetter (1989) outlines. This places stress on collective and cooperative action, on universal rights and responsibilities and on policies which foster individuality, diversity and plurality both in and through the curriculum and schooling and in wider society. It is a view which has equity uppermost in its concerns. Others in the book claim feminist or liberal perspectives. We offer a generally critical reading of the education policies which currently are defining the work contexts of teachers in the UK and which, in our view, hinder the task of promoting equity and equality in the education system.

Equality of Opportunity Pre-Thatcherism

With Byrne (1985) we have taken the view that one of the weaknesses of the United Kingdom’s attempts to achieve an educational equality programme in the state system in the 1960s and 1970s was its refusal to define what was meant by equality in education, and conceptualize its implications for the curriculum in schools. As we have argued (Davies and Evans, 1984; Evans and Davies, 1990), the patchy advent of comprehensive schooling in England and Wales produced neither organizational, curricular nor pedagogical reform capable of providing a common education for all. The Labour governments which introduced Circular 10/65 requesting Local Authorities to submit plans for comprehensive reorganization, and passed the 1976 Education Act, made no attempt to define or lay down guidelines for the provision of a comprehensive education. Caroline Benn (1979) makes the point that

It was impossible to ensure equality of opportunity without a definition of those minimum opportunities which should be available to all boys and girls in any school called a ‘comprehensive’. To try to define them would have conflicted with the laissez-faire policy of governments in implementing the reform since 1965, a policy adopted by both political parties in the vain hope of appeasing two different kinds of political opposition, (p. 197)

Two powerful ideologies, those of human capital theory and of an ‘access’ version of equality, shaped the unsystematic development of the ‘comprehensives’ and the actions of teachers, including Physical Educationalists, within them. In the economic expansion and social optimism of the early 1960s it was widely believed that the educational system could be changed in such a way as to provide both greater equality in society and economic efficiency. Much of the ideological basis of this outlook in the UK as elsewhere (cf. Lauder, 1988) lay in ‘human capital theory’ and the view that ‘investing in human capital not only increased individual productivity, but in so doing, also laid the technical base for the type of labour force necessary for rapid economic growth’ (Chitty, 1987, p. 9). As Chitty points out, a version of this philosophy proved highly attractive to a Labour government which, in the 1960s (CCCS, 1981), was more committed to reform (for which the twin watchwords were social equality and economic progress) than to radical social and educational change. To the powerful Fabians who achieved dominance within the Labour Party, bringing children of different abilities and social backgrounds together within the comprehensive organizational form promised a means of not only moving the educational system in the direction of greater equality of opportunity and social justice but also of securing greater economic efficiency. It would help avoid the underskilling of children which was contingent upon the existing ‘selective’ school system and disastrous for an expanding and changing hi-tech economy. It would also begin to erode the unfairness of a system which denied to all children equality of access to a high-status grammar school education. The debates of the 1950s and 1960s, as Shilling notes in chapter 4, centred on issues of wastage of talent and equality of access to education and PE within it. Matters relating to what should be learned or how it should be acquired were of comparatively little concern. The early development of a comprehensive system was thus not grounded in anything approximating radical or even democratic socialist principles but in what Lauder (1988) has termed an ‘enlightened individualism’ which warmly embraced a commitment to a discourse which emphasized both the skilling of more children and a version of equal opportunities which, with its emphasis mainly on issues of access, had very little to do with egalitarian concerns with the structuring of opportunities both inside and outside schools. As Wilby remarks:

Educational equality was an attempt to achieve social change by proxy. More and better education was more politically palatable and less socially disruptive than direct measures of tackling inequality. So was economic growth. Even the most complacently privileged could hardly object to children attending better schools and to the nation producing more wealth. Equality of educational opportunity had an altogether more agreeable ring to it than any other form of equality, such as equality of income or equality of property. With its overtones of self-improvement, it could even appeal to the more conservative elements in society…. Ugly words such as redistribution and expropriation did not apply to education—or nobody thought they applied. Education was a cornucopia, so prolific of good things that nobody would need any longer to ask any awkward questions about who got what. (Wilby quoted in Chitty, 1987, p. 10)

The reforms of the 1960s were seen as a means of producing a greater degree of social harmony without in any way disturbing the basic class structure of a capitalist system (Chitty, loc cit). They were not concerned with issues of social class restructuring and on matters of gender, race and disability there was a resounding silence (see Arnot, 1991).² After twenty years of ‘comprehensive schooling’ in England and Wales, it is therefore unsurprising that such reports of social research that we have find selection largely intact. While comprehensive schools effectively undercut the more obvious forms of physical separation of pupils, they did not require or help teachers to reconsider their thinking about knowledge, the nature of ability, or the nature and purpose of secondary education (Davies, 1991).

We do not mean to denigrate the intentions and efforts of comprehensive reformers. Indeed we share the views of Hargreaves and Reynolds (1989), Simon (1988) and Kelly (1991) that the late 1960s and the 1970s were years in which widening educational opportunities, improved identification of educational talent, postponement and reduction of educational selection and differentiation and broadened curriculum entitlement did become issues, principles and goals. Although it is easier to create the impression of crisis than it is to romanticize the achievements of the comprehensive system, with these authors we would claim that inside many schools it was possible to find initiatives driven by concerns to express equality of opportunity in organizational and curricular terms, for example in the replacement of streaming with banding and mixed-ability grouping, by attempts to extend core and common knowledge contents for longer periods across a wider ability range and in challenging first sexism and then other forms of prejudice in the curriculum. It is, however, difficult to claim that such initiatives were ever widespread in PE, although moves towards a more pupil-centred education through access to a wider and less gendered range of physical activities for all pupils, the use of more individualized coaching techniques in the teaching of games and expansion of the media of educational gymnastics and dance were important though always piecemeal. They were persistently threatened by the criticism of conservative factions within the profession (see Kirk, 1990 and Evans, 1990b) and a well organized and vociferous political Right outside it. Those comprehensives reaching maturity in the late 1980s, schools in some measure actualizing an ‘equal value principle’ and endeavouring to effect a system of state education which was more democratic and capable of meeting the needs of all children, are, however, now in danger of being ‘cut off in their prime’ (Hargreaves and Reynolds, 1989). We have entered a period of decomprehensivization in which the concept of equality is being critically redefined.

Creating a Crisis

In the last decade, Conservative policy had systematically portrayed teachers in state schools in England and Wales as syndicalist obstacles to freedoms which could be better guaranteed by the principles of the market. This critique was not new. Reaction against so-called progressive developments in the state education system and a reassertion of arguments for a more selective and differentiated system, for more economic value and a proper return for investment of public money in the education system, had been voiced in earnest throughout the 1960s and early 1970s (see Kelly, 1991). The Black Paper writers (Cox and Dyson, 1969a, 1969b; Cox and Boyson, 1977) at this time did not reject the principle of equality of opportunity in the system but rather the means of its achievement and expression in schools. As one stated,

Let us, however, clarify the term ‘equality of opportunity’. It does not mean equality of education—rather the contrary, for equality of education would really mean the perpetuation of the social and economic inequality existing outside the school. Whatever the progressive ideologues may think, schools neither create nor preserve social and economic inequality: social divisions are a product of human society, and schools as creations of the same society, merely reflect these divisions. Education is not and can not be an instrument of ‘social engineering’; its purpose is not the establishment of social equality—but it can play an important part offsetting the effects of existing social inequality. To quote Angus Maude: ‘The object of the exercise is not to give every child an equal chance; it is to give every child the best possible chance to develop and make the most of his own special talents’. This can be accomplished only by an unequal differentiated educational system, which levels out the handicap created for the able pupil by the inadequacies of his family’s social and economic position. (Szamuely, 1969, pp. 49–50)

It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: John Evans and Brian Davies
• Chapter 1 Equality, Equity and Physical Education and Brian Davies: John Evans and Brian Davies
• Chapter 2 Removing the Ugly ‘Isms’ in Your Gym: Thoughts for Teachers on Equity: Patt Dodds
• Section One Concepts and Issues
• Section Two Strategies for Change in Physical Education
• Index