Physical Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice: A Position Statement

ABSTRACT

This article examines the complex but seldom articulated relationship of primary physical education, citizenship, and social justice. We argue that to conflate physical activity and sport with physical education in unacknowledged ways may serve to perpetuate the status quo. More significantly, the current emphasis on activity through competitive sport in the teaching of physical education in primary schools is both reductive and educationally limiting, affecting not only teachers’ professionalism but the wider educational experience of young people. The trend towards competitive sport at the expense of a broader educational experience further represents a potentially serious omission: an abrogation of responsibility on the part of schools in England and Wales to meet the statutory requirements of the Education Reform Act (1988). On the thirtieth anniversary of the Act, we adopt a novel approach, utilizing Foucauldian ideas, to examine movements in the development of policy and understand the contemporary context as a means to suggest more propitious ways forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Physical education
• citizenship
• social justice
• critique
• Foucault

Notes

1. In the foreword to this influential policy text, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, opened by proclaiming that: ‘Sport matters’. Sport is not merely regarded as a panacea for society’s ills but one that largely absolves government of responsibility by enabling ‘individuals [striving] to succeed’ (2000, p. 3). This was later awkwardly juxtaposed with Game Plan (2002), exhibiting a clear strategy and hence more explicit intervention.

2. We acknowledge the potential limitation of our recommendation when placed within the broader economic and global education policy context, for global analyses of policy processes suggest we cannot understand individual education systems simply by reference to internal processes alone. While the primacy of performatively driven educational goals may, in practice, be hard to circumvent, we must nevertheless begin somewhere, inviting examples of more creative, critically discerning and innovative pedagogical practices.