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physical education. With care and attention many sports can be made
to appeal to them and to give pleasure and satisfaction. They will play
as well as they can but they will never be very good. It it not true, however,
that if a game is worth playing it is worth playing badly?
I spoke earlier of nineteenth century efforts to avoid the danger
of winning at any price. In the mid-twentieth century the danger has
reappeared in a new guise. The danger is one place removed from the
field of play and threatens not so much the spirit of the game but the
personality of the sportsman in training.
It is well known that swimmers mature early. In Australia there
are district championships for children under seven years old and Dawn
Frazer was picked out as a potential Olympic competitor at 8 years
of age. Training for first class competition is long and arduous and absorbing.
In such a situation the child may well be subjected to pressures
which he is too young to recognise or to resist. They may arise from
the interest of the press or of sports goods manufacturers, from the concern
of the school for its reputation, from the desire of the coach or
teacher to promote his own professional status and even from the ambition
of parents for their children's success.
Perhaps the dangers are more apparent in swimming than in most
other sports but they are certainly not confined to swimming.
Some teachers, recognising these dangers, are so afraid of competitive
sport that they endeavour to exclude it or minimise it in school
programmes and to concentrate on other forms of physical education,
such as educational gymnastics and dance. Among such teachers are
a number of specialist teachers of physical education, but we shall
not control the flood by running away from it. On the contrary we
need more than ever to contain it and direct it into channels of our
choosing. This great source of energy and power must not be allowed
to run to waste nor yet to flow just where it will. The engineers who
must do this great work are sports administrators, coaches and, above
all, teachers.
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