Aligning Olympic education with the liberal arts: a curriculum blueprint from Taiwan

Abstract

Background: For some time the Olympics have enjoyed a relatively cosy, and quite unsurprising, relationship with Physical Education and its practitioners. Yet, as academics continue their critiques of all matters Olympic, this seemingly symbiotic partnership is being placed under much closer scrutiny. The debates are typically orientated around several key concerns, namely, the vagaries of Olympic discourse, the implicit assumptions that align Olympic idealism with ‘good’ moral education, the relevance of Olympic values in young peoples' lives, the Olympic industry's politicizing/colonizing of educational domains, and the utility of Olympic ideals for affecting social, cultural, and (physical) educational change. One other discussion thread, which we add to in this paper, has been the (in)congruencies between Olympic idealism and non-Western cultural contexts and educational frameworks. Combined, the scholarly voices essentially encourage theorists and practitioners to approach the relationship between education and the Olympics with care.

Context and curriculum overview: Cognizant of these contentions, this paper exhibits an Olympic education curriculum for first-year undergraduate students enrolled within a provincial Taiwanese University's Liberal Arts programme. We detail three tentative themes around which an Olympic education curriculum might be constructed: Peace, Multiculturalism, and Global sensibilities. These particular themes are concomitant with Olympic idealism, but also align with contemporary East Asian Liberal Arts frameworks. In our curriculum design, the emphasis is on developing an Olympic education that not only introduces students to broader global ideas (e.g. universality and cosmopolitan citizenry), but that respects and reflects national/localized specificities (e.g. Asian philosophical traditions and their legacies in educational institutions).

Considerations: The paper stresses the need to further Olympic debates outside the traditional domains of sport and Physical Education, and continue the challenge to Western-orientated sport pedagogies. Our intention is to create a strong cross-cultural study Olympic-inspired Liberal Arts programme that may better link tertiary students in Taiwan with key sport institutions in East Asia, and also throughout the wider communities around the world. We envision aspects of our course material may hopefully serve as a useful reference for other teachers and provide a blueprint for future curricula that might challenge Western-Olympic education orientations.

Keywords:

• Olympic education
• Liberal Arts education
• Olympism
• East Asia
• Taiwan

Notes

1. We follow the directions encouraged by Philosopher Immanuel Kant (see, Kant and Meredith [1790] 2007) (and others) that axioms are not stable and fixed entities, but fragile and fragmentary notions whose position within rhetoric and logic is only legitimated through power hierarchies and political relations. Such a system – inherently human (social-constructed) in its design and implementation – is thus certainly susceptible (and in very need of) critique and disruption. To this end, Olympic axioms (in the most simplest form, the assumption proffered by the Olympic movement that humanistic ideals are synonymous and/or aligned with athletic virtues and modern sporting excellence) are capable of being critiqued as both an ideology and human practice.

2. To note, in most international contexts, Olympism/Olympic education has, by both tradition and design, predominantly resided within the discipline of Physical Education. Namely, this has been due to the explicit position of Olympism and Olympic education as a domain that intertwines sport, culture and education through practices of the body. While there have been some moves to extend the educational dissemination of Olympism beyond Physical Education (in United Kingdom and New Zealand, for instance), by in large Olympic education (with its discernable proselytizing of humanistic and corporeal values and ideals) remains strongly rooted with Physical Education pedagogy, rhetoric and praxis. As such, the positioning of Olympism within/alongside Liberal Arts and General Education in this paper is quite unique (certainly within the Taiwan/East Asian context), and also atypical of most approaches. For a more detailed discussion of the symbiotic relationship between Physical Education and Olympism/Olympic education, see Chatziefstathiou (2011b, 2012) and Kohe (2010).