ABSTRACT
I argued in Chapter 2 in discussing the possibility of ‘the idea of the idea’ of physical education that too often physical educators have spent energy struggling over ideas of physical education and in the process much of the time have failed to see the bigger picture: the id2 of physical education and how it is constructed and constituted through its relationships to wider issues in society. A good example of this which I mentioned briefly in Chapter 5 is the debate in Scotland, in November 1954, over which version of gymnastics should form the future of physical education for boys in Scottish secondary schools. Representatives from the Scottish Physical Education Association (the men’s association) and the Scottish League of Physical Education (representing the women) met in Edinburgh to discuss the topic of ‘Physical Education Today and in the Future’, later reported in The Leaflet, 56 (1), 1955. After prolonged and at times heated debate, the delegates could not reach an agreed position and a further four one-day meetings were organised. Finally, an outcome was reached. The status quo prevailed. It was agreed that boys’ physical education would continue to be based on Swedish gymnastics. We know from Chapter 5 that they made the wrong choice. Swedish gymnastics was barely to survive the decade, while educational gymnastics thrived into the 1970s, though mainly in girls’ physical education and in primary schools, while the least considered contender, Olympic gymnastics as it was then known, became the main version of gymnastics in schools from the 1980s, though no longer the centrepiece of the id2 of physical education.
