Educating Copacabana: a critical analysis of the “Second Half”, an Olympic education program of Rio 2016

Abstract

The Second Half Program (SHP) is an educational sports program running in Brazil. It began in 2003 and was one of the Olympic educational proposals described in the Rio 2016 Olympics bid. Using sport as a tool, the SHP aims to deliver moral education and to promote citizenship in order to counteract “social exclusion” and “social vulnerability”. Our analysis of official SHP documents and interviews with key actors in several SHPs reveals that the SHP illustrates the view that merely participating in sport will instill moral and Olympic values. Thus, although it represents a clear advance in government sports education policies, both its organizational methods and the lack of a clear pedagogy seem to limit the scope of the SHP to sports teaching. It thus fails to reach the broader scope that should be approached in an Olympic educational program.

Keywords:

• Olympic education
• Second Half Program
• Rio 2016 Olympics
• values education

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge Dr Constance Ellwood for her support during the English editing process of this paper. The authors would also like to warmly acknowledge the research assistants Mr Eduardo Viganor Silva and Mr Donaldson Thompson for their invaluable help along the field data collection.

Notes

1. Olympic Movement is the term employed to refer to the institutions and people directly connected to the organization of the Olympic Games, under IOC leadership.

2. All documents and publications are in Portuguese. Extracts cited here have been translated by the authors.

3. The name Second Half comes from the way schools are structured in Brazil, combined with the Brazilian passion for football. In Brazil, students in most schools attend for four hours a day, either morning or afternoon. Their “first turn” is this half school day. The “Second Half” program draws on the metaphor of a football game: for the “first-half” of the “game”, the student studies and for the “second-half”, plays sports.

4. The interviews were carried out in Portuguese. Translations are the authors’.

5. Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica [Basic Education Development Index] (IDEB) Vitória = 3.8; IDEB Brasil = 4.0.