The ‘obesity crisis’ and school physical education

Abstract

The article builds on a number of recent critical reviews to argue that claims that we are experiencing an obesity crisis are almost entirely without foundation. The possibility is explored that this crisis is manufactured through a complex process of the social production of knowledge. The article marshals evidence to challenge the basis upon which crisis claims are made. In the context of this challenge, the relationship of this alleged crisis to school physical education is explored. Despite ambivalence from physical educators over the place of health-related exercise in their programmes, I propose that they may find it increasingly difficult to resist calls for physical education to be held accountable for children's health. This is because the notion of the obese child generates a powerful and increasingly pervasive cultural symbolism of degeneration. I conclude that there is a need for a critical pedagogy in physical education to provide a morally and educationally defensible form of engagement with obesity discourse.

Keywords:

• Childhood obesity
• School physical education
• Health-related exercise
• Obesity discourse

Notes

1. An almost endless list of examples could be provided. Articles on the ‘obesity crisis’ and ‘couch potato kids’ appear weekly in newspapers in the UK. For an international academic example, an issue of the Journal of Teaching in Physical Education (2004)—a prominent international educational research journal—arrived in my mailbox days after I finished writing this article. It was a special issue on ‘Physical education, physical activity and public health’.

2. This is not to suggest that obesity in children and adults, where it does occur, is not a problem that must be treated with the utmost seriousness.

3. In a close analysis of a report on obesity similar to Gard's studies, Evans (2003, p. 92) notes the intentional but unheralded conflation of figures for overweight and obesity under the single heading of obesity to ‘add weight’ to the authors’ claims that there is indeed an obesity crisis.

4. A case in point is the £1 billion of public money that has been pledged during the second term of office of the Blair government in the UK to fund a cluster of initiatives and interventions in physical education and school sport, each of which is framed, rhetorically at least, by a health rationale (DfES, 2002).