The social construction of physical education Present, past and future

Subject fields or disciplines have been invented; they are socially constructed
and constituted by humans.
(Lawson, 1991: 286)
We will always be in the middle of the story of our society, and thus judgement
of the significance and value of what has already happened is inseparable
from judgement of the present, and of the feasibility and desirability of
possible futures.
(Chanan and Gilchrist, 1974: 62)
The act of defining physical education goes somewhat beyond the statement
of beliefs, values and aspirations, important though these statements may be.
Physical education is defined by what is said, done and written in its name,
as are all other school subjects and university disciplines. It is, in the words
of Ivor Goodson (1997) and of Hal Lawson (1991), socially constructed. So
when some physical educators bemoan a lack of consensus among their
peers about the nature of their subject, when a number of apparently competing
written definitions of physical education vie for their attention, and
when they point to a proliferation of titles for university departments, they
overlook the enduring commonalities of physical education practice, particularly
in terms of what people say and do in the subject’s name. This
practice conforms to a concept of physical education – what I will in this
book refer to as ‘the idea of the idea of physical education’1 or the id2 – that
has remained more or less intact since around the middle of the last century,
transcends the national borders of economically advanced countries and
other nations that have had some formal association with these countries,
and that has been highly resistant to change.
I use the expressions ‘more or less’ and ‘around’ because each country,
each region, each state and each city can demonstrate differences in terms of
key events and moments, outstanding leaders, local forces and particular
circumstances. For instance, Britain resisted the overt influence of militarism
in favour of a more therapeutic form of physical training in the early 1900s
when it adopted the Swedish system of gymnastics as its preference for elementary schools while in the same period Australia located its elementary
school physical training squarely within a national scheme of compulsory
military cadet training. Or, more precisely, and to make my point, the neonate
Australian states of Victoria and Queensland, the two main sources of
evidence for Schooling Bodies (Kirk, 1998a), adopted the cadet scheme,
though each in its own, inimitable, way. Regardless of where we look and
with only a few exceptions, we will find histories of physical education
dating from the late 1800s to the present that show differences in nuanced
detail. But the differences are for the most part less significant than the
similarities.2
Physical educators, perhaps more than educators in other subjects and
disciplines, have a history of passionate advocacy for their specialism.
Indeed, this characteristic would be one of the things that they have in
common, across nations, cultures, gender and time. Why this is so we can
only speculate; perhaps it has been something to do with living in a marginal
role, as Leo Hendry (1976) put it, as the pre-eminently most embodied subject
of an otherwise mostly cerebral curriculum. Whatever the reason for
their passion, physical educators have typically held strong opinions about
their subject and have felt compelled to express these, sometimes forcefully,
to whomever might listen. This characteristic in itself has been partly
responsible for the enduring but misleading idea that physical education is a
field riven by difference, where disputatious individuals and groups offer
rival philosophies of their subject. At least, the idea has been misleading
since around the 1970s onwards, when the current id2 of physical education
was consolidated in secondary schools and teacher-education colleges. Prior
to the 1970s, as a shift from gymnastics to sport-techniques was bedding
down, the field was indeed riven by noisy disputes, as I pointed out in
Defining Physical Education (Kirk, 1992a). Since that time, a proliferation of
definitions of physical education allied to a rapid expansion of programme
content and considerable variance between schools in terms of what is
offered as physical education have together combined to create the impression
of a field that is amorphous (Proctor, 1984), an impression that succeeds
in masking the commonality of practice within the id2 of physical
education-as-sport-techniques. I suggest too that at a more philosophical
level, many (though not all) disputatious physical educators have misunderstood
the object of their disagreements (Locke, 1998: 248); as one example,
those physical educators who insist that ‘physical education’ and ‘sport’ are
such different phenomena that no definition of physical education should
even refer to sport, as is the case with the National Curriculum Physical
Education in England and Wales (see Green, 1998; Penney and Chandler,
2000: 74), when in fact, as I aim to show, the currently dominant id2 of
physical education has been grounded in a particular version of sport from
at least the 1950s.
So what is the practice of physical education that informs far and wide
this id2 and that is apparently so enduring and resistant to change?