ABSTRACT
In the ordinary routines of our everyday professional lives, where timetables and habit rule and the school bell tolls with a remorseless predictability, cohorts of children can pass through a teacher’s consciousness with an alarming unfamiliarity, especially in the highly regulated systems of secondary schooling. Within such institutional conditions of work, pressured and demanding as they are, teachers could be forgiven for thinking that their impact on what children think about themselves, their bodies and each other is at best minimal or at worst of no significance at all. Rarely does mundane teaching work receive much attention, whether praiseworthy or malicious, other than at times of educational crisis or curriculum reform. Giroux, though perhaps underestimating the capacities of teachers, is not far off the mark when he states:
Various dimensions of the schooling process are viewed by teachers as apolitical and ahistorical in nature; and, in the final analysis, schooling itself is perceived as an instrumental process governed by technical problems and answerable by ‘common sense solutions’. This perspective flattens reality and effectively removes the dynamics of schooling from the realm of ethical and political debate. Educators, in this case tend to view themselves as impartial facilitators who operate in a value free and uncontaminated setting. (Giroux, 1981, p. 80)
It is my contention in this chapter that what goes on inside physical education classrooms, through both the organization and social relations of knowledge production (or the form) and the curriculum content of schooling, does matter greatly. It has an important bearing on the identities, abilities and opportunities of teachers and pupils and therefore on the kind of society in which we live. I will also claim that understanding what teachers do to children, how and why, for example, they typify, differentiate and label them as they do, sometimes to the detriment of many, may be inseparable from first knowing better how the lives of teachers themselves are shaped, created and constrained in the contemporary conditions of schooling and historically over time. Indeed, it might reasonably be argued that to date in sociological and educational debate issues of social control have been considered and discussed largely in terms of the control of children. Obviously, knowing how pupils are socially controlled is vitally important in any quest to understand how schools and physical education within them sponsor and develop particular sorts of attitudes and identities among children and so help position class and cultural relationships. But the point I will stress is that teachers in common with other
workers are also subject to systems of supervision and control. Indeed, never has this been more evidently the case than in Thatcher’s Britain (Evans and Davies, 1988a). They too are labelled and differentiated, typified and evaluated and have to work hard to protect their sometimes fragile educational identities and social positions. Teachers not only control pupils, they too are controlled by pupils, as well as being manipulated and processed by their peers and others outside the educational workplace in ways which we only sketchily understand.
