While sport was recognised as having educational virtues as early as the late nineteenth century in England, the situation in France was quite different. Considered to be both futile and dangerous, this social practice only featured anecdotally in manuals and official instructions directing physical education at school until 1967. The relationship with sport raises deep questions concerning the body’s place in education. More precisely, it emphasises bodily expectations, as well as the usefulness of examining them. The sporting body itself was not without significance. How, then, should resistance to the integration of sport be apprehended? Over and beyond political contexts, what were the reasons contributing to this tardy acknowledgement? In order to answer these questions, this study explores an avenue as yet unexplored. It undertakes to compare the discourse and knowledge production of sports advocates with the prominent features of the disciplinary power that tends to characterise all institutions. The corpus supporting the analysis includes publications dealing with sport (37 books and 160 articles) with a view to understanding the ideological and societal frames of the activity, together with education treaties and professional teaching reviews to comprehend relationships with sport as the latter’s importance continued to grow throughout the twentieth century. This contribution shows how the integration of sport as a unique medium for teaching physical education in the French education system depended on the degree of its conceptualisation and implied inevitable bodily control. For while sport may be associated with freedom and emancipation, making it educational meant controlling it and practising it moderately. Indeed, sport differs as a teaching element from the rest and is polarised by the values it conveys: excellence, performance, surpassing oneself and hierarchisation, which require dealing with it methodologically. Method was only truly established when work focusing on sport gave it a complete and unquestionable disciplinary foundation. During the first phase extending from the end of the First World War to the reconstruction, those in favour of education through sport developed their knowledge of sports techniques. In so doing, they highlighted the potentially normed, efficient, profitable and organised character of the sporting gesture. Moreover they advocated model-based pedagogy, according to which it was easy to compare instructors to true behaviour technicians. The body as a machine remained significant, although it was movement that was encouraged. In spite of the progress made, sport failed to make its way into schools, except during the Vichy period (1940–1944) to better control the masses. During the 1950s and 1960s, those promoting the teaching of sports-based physical education continued their research into sports techniques while, at the same time, widening their scope of investigation. Sports exercises became the nodal point of their reflection and resulting publications offered series of tasks that were described with great precision, and concurrently repetitive, graded in difficulty and organised over the long term. They presented an alternative model of bodily education. The latter’s sycophants engaged in work concerning, more particularly, assessment of the sporting body and offered tools for hierarchising performances. A number of experts focused on the notion of tactics, and the result of their reflection made it possible to link sport to a method for rationally organising individuals’ strength under a central command. Their innovations endowed sport with a sufficiently solid foundation for its integration, and it became the sole medium for teaching physical education at school as from 1967. However, the question of rational distribution of pupils and bodily control based on defined criteria was not addressed, and long-term organisation of learning was lacking. These were the two issues theoreticians undertook to address in the 1970s and 1980s. With a view to meeting the requirements of a supervisory body, they created levels within each sport, organised learning according to clear and detailed objectives and worked on drawing up criteria-based assessment. Over a period lasting less than 20 years, they provided the missing elements for defining a true disciplinary method. Effective acknowledgement of sport as a rich and pertinent medium for physical education at school was fully achieved with the publication of physical education and sport programmes in the mid-1990s.
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May 4, 2018
Kilian Mousset + 1
Open Access