Mindfulness, sport and the body: the justification of physical education revisited

Abstract

This paper offers a preliminary account of the educative potential of mindfulness by revisiting the long-debated status of physical activity and sport as educationally worthwhile. We argue that previous attempts in the tradition of analytic philosophy of education to offer a justification of physical activity and sport have not been sufficiently grounded in the most distinctive feature of those activities—the body. As an alternative, we claim that the theory and practice of body-based mindfulness can explain how physical activity can satisfy the analytic philosopher of education R.S. Peters’ requirement that for an activity to be educationally worthwhile, it must possess ‘wide-ranging cognitive content’. We conclude that physical activity and sport are justifiable on Petersian grounds: physical activity can broaden understanding mostly inaccessible to the kinds of theoretical activities (science and/or philosophy) that Peters argued are exemplary. We then assess the implications for this argument in terms of how such an account can inform physical educators’ understanding of the place of physical education and sport in their teaching practice.

Keywords:

• Mindfulness
• physical education
• philosophy of education
• conceptual analysis

Notes

1. For Peters, subject-based teaching and initiation into forms of knowledge are two very different activities. In the former, disciplines are simply the organizing body under which certain propositions are transmitted (i.e. education as information). Forms of knowledge require understanding and care for the rational standards that define a form of inquiry. Such standards have instrumental as well as intrinsic value. Science can help us design better buildings, but it is also valuable simply because it is concerned with truth and understanding for its own sake.

2. See also Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s (1991) depiction of ‘mindfulness’ as experiencing ‘what one’s mind is doing as it does it’ (23).

3. See also Davidson (2012) and Siegel (2015) for contemporary theories that integrate findings from neuroscience and psychology toward an understanding of the substantial function of emotions in cognition, decision-making, and day-to-day functioning.

4. It is important, however, at this point to comment on a possible issue that arises when considering the above analytical breaking down of the process of cognition in relation to how we think of skilled performance in the context of athletics and sports. The latter is often associated with spontaneity, non-thinking, and even a loss of self-awareness that Csikszentmihalyi (1990) coined as ‘flow’. That is, athletes, professional football, or basketball players often reveal their mastery in actions that can hardly be explained as the result of time-consuming computations and appraisals. They are in fact ‘mindless’ of the act. They simply perform it, whereas novices would have to think things through. In this context, mindfulness practice may seem out of place, in fact, as a cumbersome addition that will hinder performance. Three things need to be kept in mind in this sense: first, as many professional athletes (as well as artists) would attest, mastery is in many cases the result of years of an arduous breaking down of wholes into parts that are ideally integrated into improved embodied habits that yield a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. On this note, loyal to our justification criteria, we view this breaking down as bringing into view more of the cognitive richness involved in our embodied existence; in this case, in the understanding of the emotional aspects of perception. Second, we suggest that mastery of bodily performance can be thought of as a byproduct of PE, but at least in the context of school, it is not its main aim. On this note, the cognitive richness that is brought forth by a mindfulness approach to PE (practically elaborated in the next part) makes a stronger case for justifying PE in the curriculum, than the possible effects of compromising athletic performance at the novice levels. Third, offering another angle, we suggest that the very spectrum that opens here between what seems as a cumbersome heightened awareness and peak performance in which we ‘lose ourselves in the act’, so to speak, may in itself become a rich terrain of mind states to be explored as part of a mindfulness approach to a PE curriculum. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each pole? What are the states experienced in between, etc?

5. We would like to acknowledge one of the anonymous reviewers for this important critical point.