Sport Education as a pedagogy for promoting sport as ethical practice

It is now relatively easy to discredit the idea, passed down from the elite private schools of England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras, that ‘sport builds character’. Although cynicism about the moral properties of games was evident even in the heyday of what Mangan (1981) called the ‘cult of Athleticism’, in England from the 1880s up until around 1920, the fact that ‘sport builds character’ remains a dominant justification for the time, effort and resources allocated to sport through school-based physical education and organized youth sport in the community.