ABSTRACT
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
