ABSTRACT

All of a sudden, it seems, school and community physical activity programmes are newsworthy items. Research agencies in various countries, some of them government sponsored, are busily engaged in conducting or planning physical fitness surveys of school children and adults, and school physical education is featuring in the pages of the popular press and on serious current affairs television programmes. Meanwhile, the chatter surrounding the fate of international sports performers is ever present, the volume and acrimony rising sharply as the latest failure on the international scene is scrutinized and dissected, and physical educators once again find themselves included in the hunt for scapegoats. Many of these events have been taking place in Britain over the past five years, where a very public debate about school physical education has been conducted, a debate that has been more subdued in other countries, but, as we will see from the contributions to this book, has nevertheless being going on there too. What is clear from the attention that has been directed at physical education is that it has been implicated in wider societal events at a time when we are faced with an ever-growing number of crises. Those of us who read the daily press will be very well aware of the current upheavals in the world economy, with the concomitant instability in political life and chronic largescale unemployment. We are faced regularly with distressing reports of impending environmental catastrophe caused by holes in the ozone layer and the threat of diseases like AIDS reaching epidemic proportions. There can be little doubt that we live in unsettled and unsettling times, where words like ‘crisis’, ‘turmoil’ and ‘unrest’ are certainly not out of place.