Defining Physical Education (Routledge Revivals)

The Social Construction of a School Subject in Postwar Britain

David Kirk

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136451867
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Bildung
• Categoría: Sportunterricht

First published in 1992, David Kirk's book analyses the public debate leading up to the 1987 General Election over the place and purpose of physical education in British schools. By locating this debate in a historical context, specifically in the period following the end of the Second World War, it attempts to illustrate how the meaning of school physical education and its aims, content and pedagogy were contested by a number of vying groups. It stresses the influence of the culture of postwar social reconstruction in shaping these groups' ideas about physical education. Through this analysis, the book attempts to explain how physical education has been socially constructed during the postwar years and, more specifically, to suggest how the subject came to be used as a symbol of subversive, left wing values in the campaign leading to the 1987 election. In more general terms, the book provides a case study of the social construction of school knowledge.

The book takes an original approach to the question of curriculum change in physical education, building on increasing interest in historical research in the field of curriculum studies. It adopts a social constructionist perspective, arguing that change occurs through the active involvement of competing groups in struggles over limited material and ideological (discursive) resources. It also draws on contemporary developments in social and cultural theory, particularly the concepts of discourse and ideological hegemony, to explain how the meaning of physical education has been constructed, and how particular definitions of the subject have become orthodoxes. The book presents new historical evidence from a period which had previously been neglected by researchers, despite the fact that 1945 marked a watershed in the development of the understanding and teaching of physical education in schools.

Chapter 1

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Defining Physical Education: Crisis, Conflict and a Recent Debate

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For physical educators used to thinking of themselves as ”survivors in a marginal role’,¹ the events of the second half of the 1980s will have come as an unexpected and rather unpleasant surprise. Suddenly, or so it seemed, school physical education had become news-worthy, catapulted on to the front pages of the tabloid press² and publicly scrutinized by a prime-time current affairs programme.³ Sadly for the physical education profession, this media attention was not overdue recognition of teachers’ work. Rather than achieving instant stardom as unsung heroes, physical educators suffered instead the ignominy of notoriety. According to some very prominent and powerful critics, they had not been doing their jobs at all well. The reasons for this were not so much incompetence, the critics claimed, but were more to do with misguided idealism, so misguided that it risked undermining the entire structure of British sport and in turn damaging the morale of the British people.

At the height of this public debate about school physical education, which reached a peak leading up to the 1987 General Election, articles were appearing frequently in newspapers and professional journals, defending or attacking one point of view or another, speeches were being made, seminars were being held, commissions of inquiry were being organized, and letters to various editors were flying thick and fast through the postal system. What had happened to generate all of this furore and passion among the normally apathetic and docile British public? What heinous crime had physical educators committed that could raise the hackles of a number of prominent politicians? How could a subject so often ignored by political strategists and civil servants in their official plans for the school curriculum, and generally viewed as a means of light and harmless relief by many members of the (non-physical education) teaching profession and general public, so offend the sensibilities of newspaper editors and television journalists?

The answers to these questions occupy this first chapter, since they expose a range of broader issues that are the subject of investigation in this book. Indeed, the recent public debate over physical education in Britain has provided a useful context in which to locate this investigation because, although the debate is not the subject of the study in itself, it provides a dramatic demonstration of contestation and struggle to control the ideological terrain that school subjects occupy. The issues the debate has exposed relate most broadly to the social construction of school knowledge, and specifically to the definition of physical education, what the subject is, and how its aims, subject matter and pedagogy have been defined by competing interest groups. Recent developments in the sociology of school knowledge⁴ and particularly the history of school subjects⁵ have shown that school knowledge is not fixed and unchanging, but is instead constantly in process, shaped by social, political and cultural, as well as educational, forces. School knowledge is not politically and culturally neutral, but on the contrary embodies and communicates the interests and values of those parties who have a major hand in constructing the school curriculum, a process which unjustly disadvantages some categories of pupils in relation to others. A number of historical studies have appeared within this literature on most of the subjects and topics that comprise the school curriculum, but none as yet have focused on physical education. Part of this neglect is due to the traditional style of historical work in school physical education,⁶ and part of it to the marginalization of practical activities in a curriculum dominated by ”academic’ subjects.⁷ This public debate reveals, however, that the lowly educational status often imputed to physical education significantly underestimates the political and cultural significance of this field of knowledge.

This chapter outlines the purpose and the scope of this book within the context of the public debate over physical education in Britain from the mid to late 1980s, and argues the case for a study of the social construction of physical education during the immediate post-second world war period, in which the underpinning or ”structuring’ discourses of contemporary physical education programmes were contested and put in place. I want to argue in this and subsequent chapters that this period represents a watershed in British physical education discourse, a new moment in the production of definitions of physical education. As I will go on to argue later in this chapter and in Chapter 7, the 1970s and early 1980s witnessed the application, consolidation and further development of these discourses, a process which has only recently been disturbed in any radical way by a new crisis which first manifested itself in the public domain in the mid 1980s. The first section of this chapter considers some of the key issues exposed by this recent public debate which, as I will suggest later in this book, represents only the beginning in a new period of conflict and contestation among physical educators and other interested parties that heralds the construction of new definitions of physical education.

A Recent Public Debate

There had been some sporadic criticisms through the 1960s and 1970s of the extent to which competitive sports and games dominated physical education programmes, but this had made little impression on practice in schools. There had also been a degree of tension, which had been growing steadily since the 1950s, between some physical education teachers and youth sports bodies over who should take responsibility for elite sport. In the early 1980s, though, the dissatisfaction with team games as the main form of activity in physical education began to grow, finding expression in journals like the Bulletin of Physical Education.⁸ Most of this criticism continued to be contained within professional discourse in physical education and aimed primarily at physical education teachers and teacher educators, while the antagonism between teachers and sports coaches and administrators often amounted to little more than a stand-off, and their problems rarely, if ever, aired in public. The events between 1985 and 1988 marked a new phase in this process, when the debate over the relationship between school physical education and elite sport entered a much more public arena.

One of the first indications of the shift in scale of the debate appeared late in 1985 when The Times Educational Supplement reported on an attempt by representatives of the Football Association, the Rugby Union and the Cricket Board in collaboration with the Central Council for Physical Recreation’s (CCPR) Peter Lawson to lobby the Minister for Sport Dick Tracey for government coordination of physical education and sport in and out of schools. Their request was based on the claim that the expansion of activities on offer in school programmes had led to neglect of their respective sports.⁹ Very quickly, this alleged decline in team games was being touted as a symptom of ambivalence, even open hostility, among physical educators towards school sport in general and competition more specifically, and an outcome of dangerously misguided ideas about promoting co-operative and individualistic activities among pupils.¹⁰ By July 1986, the Editor of The Times Educational Supplement had joined the fray, claiming that ”traditional competitive sports in schools are under a cloud’. Sport was a popular and widespread cultural activity, the Editor argued, and yet schools were turning their backs on this fact and ”moving in the opposite direction’.

What is to be made of the 1960-ish ideology which prompts ageing PE organizers to decry traditional forms of sporting competition on the basis of value-judgments that are wildly at odds with those of the society the schools exist to serve? Last weekend, London TV viewers were treated to a comprehensive school where pupils engaged in stool-ball, a primitive forerunner to cricket played with a soft ball which, The Times man said, ”allows both sexes to play and is not competitive’. Viewers must have reflected that one thing is fairly certain; the West Indian pace attack was not reared on stool-ball and stool-ball is not going to help England find a quick bowler.¹¹

Physical educators had been neglecting their traditional responsibilities, which the Editor implied were primarily to service the needs of elite sport in England, by their adoption of some very doubtful ideas about participation and ”sport for all’. The Editor suggested that physical education teachers were letting down ”the exasperated public’, and went on to argue that if ”schools are not going to serve as the nurseries of sporting talent’, then this must be fostered in the youth clubs and youth sections of adult sports clubs. Similar themes were picked up elsewhere, most notably the following month by Denis Howell, a former Labour Minister for Sport, in an address at Loughborough’s golden jubilee. Howell stated bluntly that ”school sport is the foundation of British sport’. In response to the idea that school sport ought to be less competitive, Howell was quoted as saying ”I have never heard such nonsense. It is impossible to play games unless someone is seeking to win — which inevitably means that someone should lose. This is a fact of life... I suppose people opposed to team games will try to ban ring-a-ring o’ roses next on the extraordinary grounds that the last one to fall down is a failure’.¹²

During 1986, the popular press, from the ”respectable’ dailies down to the tabloids, had begun to enter the debate, fuelling what Andrew Pollard has referred to as ”the moral panic of 1986’ in which the press conveyed the impression that the decline of games playing in schools was now a matter of grave public concern.¹³ This conclusion seemed to be confirmed when the BBC’s Panorama went to air in March 1987 with an investigative documentary which posed the question ”Is Your Child Fit for Life?’. Richard Lindley, the writer and presenter asserted, in an article in The Listener which accompanied the programme, that:

There has been a drastic decline in team-game fixtures between state secondary schools, a decline that, in many schools, has not been arrested by the end of the teachers’ strike. And a significant reason for that seems to be a change in the attitude of physical education teachers. ”Team spirit?’ snorted Richard Swinnerton, a young PE teacher at Bill Colely’s school. ”You mean the team spirit that managed to get so many thousands and millions of people killed in World War 1? I hope we’ve replaced it with something a little better’.¹⁴

In the programme, Lindley skilfully counter-posed images of expansive, cold, bleak and empty playing fields, and boys and girls of a variety of races from a London comprehensive school dressed in a mixture of sports clothing playing small-side games, with the purposeful activity of uniformly and immaculately kitted white, Anglo-Saxon private school boys playing rugby union, and enthusiastic primary school children exercising under the scrutinizing gaze of a sports scientist surrounded by expensive-looking technical equipment. The message he wanted to convey through this imagery was that traditional values and standards of excellence in games playing, presumably represented by the grammar school pupils, were being undermined by ”ideologically motivated’ teachers who wished to promote equality by dispensing with failure. In the ”new PE’ as he named it, there seemed to be ”a variety of experience, but not always much achievement’. Later in the programme, he turned his attention to the recent concern for health-related activity in physical education, which some critics¹⁵ had claimed was in part responsible for distracting physical education teachers from their responsibilities towards team games, and marshalled evidence which suggested children were less fit than they had been at some unspecified point in the past.

At this point in the programme, Lindley’s messages did seem to become a little tangled and confusing. It was not clear, for example, whether the new health orientation was meant to be viewed as a ”good thing’, and the extent to which its arrival might be significant for team games. This confusion was also clear from his comments in the Listener article, where he suggested that:

at their best, traditional team games stretch and exercise only a minority of children, even if the teachers are prepared to make the effort of organizing them. “Sport for all” offers a theoretical opportunity to involve more children, but in practice may be too thinly spread to offer any really good physical education. So how can we help children acquire the habit of exercise that could offer them both pleasure and health throughout life?’¹⁶

Despite this confusion, which perhaps was a result of his attempt to impose his own ”ideologically motivated’ view on a far from simple set of issues,¹⁷ Lindley’s use of imagery and language successfully conveyed the impression that something was badly amiss with school physical education, providing confirmation of the barrage of criticisms during 1986 that had preceded the Panorama presentation.

John Evans has argued that following the Panorama programme, ”the public at large could be forgiven for thinking that something both radical and widespread was happening, as damaging to the country’s economic well-being as it was to its performance on various national and international sporting scenes’. The sheer weight of criticism, its often high-ranking sources and wide public exposure these criticisms were given through the popular press all contributed to lend credence and legitimacy to the debate over physical education. But just as the noise and acrimony of the conflict seemed to be reaching a crescendo, the ”problem’ appears to have been solved. As Evans went on to remark:

Less than twelve months after the BBC Panorama programme was shown, many of the national newspapers could carry the story. . . rarely given front page position, that the place and position of competitive team games in schools was not only alive and secure but also strongly endorsed by no less than the Inner London Education Authority, which most of the press had previously taken great delight in characterizing as amongst the most politically radical and dangerously extreme in Britain. The crisis, it seemed, was over. The profession had come to its senses, even that lion of radicalism (the) ILEA had been tamed.¹⁸

According to Evans, the critics seemed to have achieved victory, or at the very least, a number of potentially ”radical’ forces had been neutralized. However, the suddenness with which the problems in school physical education appeared to be ”resolved’ should not be permitted to disguise the fact that something quite dramatic and significant had happened to physical education and the way in which it had been viewed both inside the profession and out. In the first place, and while th...