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Introduction 1
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Physical education has been a regular feature of the school curriculum in many countries 3
around the world for at least a century (Puhse and Gerber, 2005). Even in school systems 4
where it has been described as a ‘non-cognitive activity’, as it was by the Munn Report in 5
1970s Scotland (Scottish education Department, 1977), it nevertheless managed to establish 6
itself within the core curriculum, albeit with less curriculum time than the more lauded 7
subjects of English, Maths and Science. There have been some individuals, such as 8
philosopher of education John White (1973), who have vociferously disputed that physical 9
education is in any sense a ‘school subject’, and indeed argued that its place in the school 10
curriculum has most often been supported by disreputable claims about character 11
development and brain functioning. Richard Peters’ (1966) apparently knock-down 12
arguments, though directed at ‘games’ rather than physical education, should have seen an 13
end to any pretensions physical educators may have had to argue that their field’s existence in 14
schools could not only be supported by reputable arguments but could also be of educational 15
value. But still physical education persisted in schools and in many respects has actually 16
thrived since the 1960s. As Hendry (1976) noted somewhat prophetically, while the physical 17
education teacher may occupy a ‘marginal role’ in schools, she was nevertheless a survivor. 18
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Whatever else we might say about physical education’s situation in the school curriculum, we 20
can be in no doubt that the existence and persistence of this ‘school subject’ has been a 21
problem for the philosophy of education or, at least, for the analytical philosophy popular in 22
the UK from the middle of the twentieth century. While analytical philosophy of education 23
may no longer be the force it once was, the questions it raised about physical education’s 24
educational status have never been conclusively resolved to the extent that it has parity of 25
esteem with other curriculum topics. In part this is due to the fact that 1960s analytical 26
philosophy of education tapped into an already existing ‘common sense consensus’ (Kirk, 27
1988) about physical education, that it was a practical activity involving limited ‘cognitive 28
content’. In school systems where an Enlightenment view of education has dominated, where 29
cognition is a defining feature of legitimate school subjects, the philosophising of individuals 30
like Peters merely seemed to confirm what everyone already knew - whatever else it may 31
offer, physical education was of limited educational value. 32
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This is not to deny that many philosophers offered excellent and persuasive defence of 34
physical education (Morgan, 2006). My view is that notwithstanding the excellence of this 35
scholarly work, it travelled little beyond the pages of the journals and books in which it was 36
recorded. Meanwhile, despite the fact that its stocks have been rising in educational systems 37
since the 1970s, the sport-based form of physical education that was a source of much 38
optimism among physical educators in the 1950s and 1960s had degenerated into an 39
institutionalised form shaped to meet the requirements of the school rather than realise the 40
rich potential of the subject and the benefits it could provide to young people (Kirk, 2010). 41
There is considerable irony in this, but also some tragedy. Perhaps physical educators have 42
been so seduced by their subject’s success that they have failed to fully acknowledge that 43
they have never achieved their most cherished aspiration, that young people would as a result 44
of their physical education experience engage in lifelong physical activity. 45
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My purpose in this paper is to revisit the enduring conundrum of physical education’s 47
situation in the school curriculum and to offer a different way of thinking about educational 48
value from what I will call a models-based approach. The crux of my argument is that 49
physical education is such a large, rich and complex field of practice that it can legitimately 50
aspire to achieve a wide range of educational outcomes for school-age children and youth. In 51
order to do this, however, it needs to take particular and different forms in contrast to its 52
current and traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’, sport technique-based, multi-activity form. 53
Moreover, I will provide two examples of pedagogical models for physical education that 54
require different justificatory arguments for their educational value, an argument based in 55
ethics for Sport Education (Siedentop, 1994) and in phenomenology and existentialism for 56
Physical Literacy (Whitehead, 2010). There are a range of pedagogical models from which to 57
choose in addition to the two already mentioned, including Teaching Games for 58
Understanding (Oslin and Mitchell, 2006), Cooperative Learning (Dyson and Casey, 2012), 59
Personal and Social Responsibility (Hellison, 2011) and Health-based Physical Education 60
(Haerens et al, 2011). The first example, Sport Education, is chosen because it is without a 61
doubt the most researched of all available pedagogical models, and because it is in my view 62
currently the most soundly justified philosophically. The second example of Physical 63
Literacy is chosen because it demonstrates a well-argued philosophical position on physical 64
education that is in my view ripe for development as a pedagogical model. 65
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I begin with a discussion of the problem of physical education for the philosophy of 67
education and highlight two enduring issues, the first a view that only one justificatory 68
argument for the educational value of physical education is possible, and the second that most 69
philosophers of physical educations’ work has been completely uniformed by the products of 70
empirical research. I then present a short exposition of a models-based approach to physical 71
education informed in the main by the work of Jewett, Bain and Ennis (1995) and Metzler 72
(2005) and argue for my preferred conceptualisation of pedagogical models. In this section I 73
then provide two examples to illustrate my arguments. The first is of the pedagogical model 74
of Sport Education and its underpinning justificatory argument in the virtue ethics of Alasdair 75
MacIntyre (1985). While, as I have noted, this first example is in my view the most mature 76
development of this models-based approach currently available to us, the second is very 77
much a work in progress. This latter is an approach to physical education informed by 78
Whitehead’s (2010) work on Physical Literacy, which I argue is a justificatory argument 79
seeking a pedagogical model. Before I provide these examples, we must confront the problem 80
of physical education for the philosophy of education. 81
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The Problem of Physical Education for the Philosophy of Education 83
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Morgan (2006) argued that the philosophy of physical education had already been eclipsed by 85
the rising star of the philosophy of sport by the 1960s in the USA and the 1970s in the UK. 86
As a sub-discipline of the philosophy of education, the philosophy of physical education in 87
the UK had, unlike its eclectic North American counterpart, been strongly influenced by an 88
approach to analytical philosophy of education championed by Richard Peters and others, 89
which tended to focus scholars on epistemological questions of the educational value of 90
physical education. Morgan argued that as the philosophy of sport gained parity with other 91
branches of philosophy from the late 1960s its concerns tended to centre on issues of value 92
surrounding sport, and particularly ethical value. In his estimation, the spirited responses of 93
philosophers of physical education successfully challenged the unfavourable outcomes for 94
their field of Peters’ and others’ rather sweeping and uncompromising conceptual analyses of 95
education. But, as Morgan implied and I will argue here explicitly, the critiques of the 96
Petersian approach by, for example, Carlisle (1969), Best (1978), Carr (1979) and Meakin 97
(1982) were, at best, Pyrrhic victories. 98
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The damage to physical education’s credibility as an educational activity had already been 100
done. This was in large part because the Petersian view on educationally worthwhile 101
activities merely reinforced what Green (2008) has called the ‘standard view’ of education 102
and what I had named earlier the ‘commonsense consensus’ (Kirk, 1988). As a ‘practical’ 103
curriculum activity, physical education self-evidently lacked the ‘cognitive content’ of 104
science, literature and, of course, without even a blush of self-consciousness on Peters’ part, 105
philosophy. A close reading of chapter 5 of Peters’ Ethics and Education (1966) today, with 106
the benefit of considerable analytical distance created by social and cultural change, reveals a 107
range of assumptions made by Peters that were clearly the product of a particular, socially 108
elite form of education (McNamee, 2009). This elitist view of culture is evident in his put-109
downs of ‘Bingo’ and ‘Billiards’ and his insistence on using a public school notion of 110
‘games’ as his anti-thesis of an educationally worthwhile activity, while at the same time 111
ignoring an already 80 year old tradition of physical training in women’s education and the 112
education of the working classes. 113
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As Morgan (2006) noted, by the mid 1980s this ideologically-loaded language analysis 115
approach began to be exposed through the application to physical education of various 116
approaches to ‘new directions’ sociology of education. Introduced to Anglophone physical 117
education scholars by Evans and Davies’ (1986), this sociological challenge to analytical 118
philosophy of education had its origins in the work of Young (1971) and colleagues 119
concerned with the social construction and reproduction of knowledge. Parry (1988) had 120
already noted the ideological nature of Petersian philosophers’ educational theorising. It took 121
detailed empirical studies of the historical and contemporary policy and practice of physical 122
education, however, to show that what physical education is and any educational value it 123
might possess can be found in the practices undertaken in its name (Kirk, 1992). 124
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This point was summarised succinctly by McNamee, who observed that “those who look for 126
conceptual unity are simply wasting their time. There is no meaningful essence to the concept 127
(of physical education)” (McNamee, 2009, p.24). At the same time, McNamee is not entirely 128
dismissive of Petersian thinking, urging a less radical critique, and favouring a re-129
interpretation of Peters’ concept of education as “initiation into a range of cultural practices 130
that have the capacity to open up the possibilities of living a full and worthwhile life” 131
(McNamee, 2009, p.23). A similar position is endorsed by Green (2008), who has noted that 132
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while physical education is socially constructed, if it is justified as a curriculum topic at all, it 133
is as a medium for transmitting valued cultural practices in the formation of persons. 134
McNamee (2009, p.24) has, in turn, offered a key insight into the situation of physical 135
education within the philosophy of education. He has noted that “historically, there have been 136
two strands in what is called physical education: sport and health (or in older times hygiene, 137
posture, and so forth). It seems clear that a different type of justificatory argument is required 138
to support each.” 139
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As Williams (1985) had pointed out, there were in fact, historically, from the 1950s in the 141
UK, at least three major ‘legitimating publics’ for school physical education, sport, health and 142
physical recreation, but at least McNamee is on the right lines with this insightful comment. 143
Throughout the period of influence of analytical philosophy of education, most philosophers 144
of physical education seemed to believe that only one ‘type of justificatory argument’ was 145
possible. This outcome may, in part, have been due to most of these philosophers holding a 146
mainly ahistorical understanding of physical education. Or, at least, some of the justificatory 147
arguments for physical education may have reflected a particular moment in the history of 148
physical education, such as, for example, the various arguments for physical education as an 149
aesthetic activity following the (relatively briefly) influential trend towards child-centred 150
educational gymnastics and movement education (Kirk, 1984). 151
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This is not, however, the full extent of McNamee’s insight. Following the end of World War 153
Two, and building on ‘New Directions’ sociology-inspired curriculum history and mainly 154
qualitative contemporary studies, the emergence of a new configuration of physical education 155
in British schools was recorded. As I have argued elsewhere (Kirk, 2010), the 1950s marked 156
a fundamental and far-reaching re-alignment of the ‘discourses’ - the public categories of 157
knowledge through which we could make sense of a school curriculum topic - from physical 158
education-as-gymnastics to physical education-as-sport techniques. The everyday practice of 159
physical education consolidated in schools over time was the teaching and learning of 160
(mostly) de-contextualised sport techniques in short lessons of 40 to 80 minutes duration, 161
often up to as recently as the 1990s in indoor facilities such as the 60’x30’ gymnasium built 162
to suit the practices of the earlier gymnastics era. Notwithstanding the ‘breadth and depth’ the 163
new National Curriculum appeared to provide physical education from the early 1990s in 164
England and Wales, the actual everyday ‘classroom’ practice of physical education remained 165