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activities in the categories of competition and combat. The enrolments
for evening institute classes support this proposition. This may be a
superficial difference but it is nonetheless real and it creates difficulties
when women teach boys and men teach girls as they do in primary
schools for even at this age boys and girls begin to be influenced by the
cultural pattern of adult society. The difference has also been reflected
in constrasting, and sometimes unnecessarily antagonistic approaches
to physical education by men and women teachers.
If we look now at the tradition of sport in schools dating as it does
from Public Schools in the 19th Century we shall be struck by two
features. The first that only very recently has the merit of 'expression,
in physical activities found any place in our curriculum even in girls
schools. Sports which have dominated the curriculum are not primarily
'expressive'. Even the way games and sports were dealt with in
schools suggested that sports were opportunities for suppressing or
controlling emotions rather than for releasing or expressing them. Educational
gymnastics, derived from Ling's corrective training, was treated
either as therapy for defects and ailments or as a 'conquest' sport
in which satisfaction was to be achieved through the mastery of difficult
feats on the ground or on apparatus. Some critics still maintain
that in boys schools in particular, competition, combat and conquest
loom too large in our physical education, and that the opportunities
for self expression and for the communication of ideas through physical
movements are restricted or non existent.
The second feature of our tradition in schools is the emphasis that
we have placed upon competitive sports even to the exclusion of combat
sports and conquest sports. Moreover, even within the realm of competitive
sports, it is the team sports which have received the lion's share
of attention and of facilities; cricket, football, hockey, netball, rather
than tennis, fives, athletics or swimming have been emphasised. As
long ago as 1851 in Tom Brown's Schooldays", a novel which influenced
education more profoundly than any other except perhaps Pestalozzis
"Leonard and Gertrude", the reason for this was fairly stated "The
discipline and reliance on one another which it (cricket) teaches is so
valuable I think" went on the master' "it ought to be such an unselfish
game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn't play that
he may win but that his side may".
"Thats very true" said Tom "and that's why football and cricket
now one comes to think of it, are so much better games than fives or
hare and hounds or any others where the object is to come in first or
to win for oneself and not that one's side may win".
It is not my intention to trace the reasons for this educational bias
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