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Post by rosenrot on Jan 25, 2008 0:18:13 GMT
This is a bit of a random topic, but since the forum is pretty lively at the moment I thought I'd try and get some opinions on this subject.
My girlfriend is studying for a degree in primary education and was telling me about how PE is taught to young kids these days. Apparently teaching actual sports (football, tennis, rugby etc.) in primary schools is now frowned upon and only games (benchball, crab football, you remember the kind of stuff I mean) should really be taught to 4-11 year olds. Its to do with teaching motor-skills and hand-to-eye coordination without complicating matters with rules.
Am I the only one to think: "What utter PC bollocks".
Admittedly we British like a good moan about things, but in the case of our current lack of sporting talent it is probably justified criticism. Surely patronising primary kids by not introducing them to real sport is damaging our future prospects and wasting talent. I'd have thought most top sporting stand-outs start their respective discipline before the age of 11 (e.g. Tiger Woods was introduced to Golf at the age of 2). I fail to see how Britain expects to nurture future sportsmen and women by depriving them of exposure and training in sport from the youngest possible age. This seems particularly odd considering the Olympics in 2012.
Admittedly kids can pick up sports later than 11, but since they are in the school system from 4, why not encourage competitive activities as early as possible? Considering the current obesity problem it would be appropriate to push kids towards activities they can carry on in later life from a young age. I think its also a disgrace that only 2hrs of PE is essential per week under the current National Curriculum.
If we compare the British system with that of America we are certainly found wanting. Competitive sport seems to be encouraged at all stages of US education. There are also dedicated programmes for turning out top wrestlers, football and baseball players etc. which this country lacks both at a high school and University level. I'm no expert in US sports, but you only have to look at the abilities of their wrestlers, proliferation of college football talent and Olympic athletes to see the fruit of this system.
My rant about British sport and education aside - and in an attempt to tie in with this forum - what are your views on teaching self-defence/martial arts in school?
Boxing used to be a staple of the school sport diet, but sadly the PC and health & safety crowds have done away with that. Do people think it would be good to encourage competitive MA at school level: judo, TKD, wrestling etc. These would provide great exercise, competitive spirit and discipline in a way that only violent sports can ;D. This would also further self-defence amongst kids. Although competitive MA, such as those listed, are not always great for this purpose they would promote fitness and technique which is a great part of self-defence anyway. Or do people think self-defence should be taught as such, without competition? Or even taught at all?
I know much of this is hypothetical as perceived violent sports are unlikely to be allowed back into schools, but I would welcome opinions on this,whether about school sport or MA/self-defence in schools.
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Post by superfoot on Jan 25, 2008 3:19:57 GMT
My taekwondo instructor actually teaches full time, and is one of a few instructors who earns a living purely from taekwondo. The majority of his teaching is done within schools, particularly primary schools, where he takes PE lessons and "motivational classes" (love how management speak permeates everything with its gayness). However I would say that his lessons are far from being a traditional martial art, think most of his lessons are like how you describe, with no competitive elements and basic motor-skill/fitness exercises. I think it would be good for MAs to be taught/available in schools but think itd be even better for the schools to focus on the main uk sports, as Im sure all the Daily Mail reading parents would be disgusted to hear that their kids are taught how to strike in class.
In an ideal world I would like to see compulsory after school sports classes, for an hour a night, with kids given the option of various sports or chess if they suck. Hopefully making kids interested in something might stop them bummin around in gangs drinking cider, seeing as youth centres no longer exist and all the parks are turned into residential areas (where i live anywaysss). This would all be funded by taxing everyone but me.
Also I think competitive fighting for kids too young is just wrong (say under the age of 12). I base this on what I have seen at many tkd comps, where you see little 5 year olds kids fighting, and their parents standing at the sides shouting "FUCKING RIP HIS HEAD OFF JOHNNY". It should be the kids choice, not the choice of the parents who wish to be successful through their kids. Although it is pretty funny.
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Post by Tom on Jan 25, 2008 14:00:02 GMT
Phil, I agree with you completely.
I think people often take a patronising atttude towards what kids are actually capable of. Why couldn't kids play "proper" sports at an early age? Surely that would be the best time to teach them, as up to the age of 7, the brain is at it's peak in terms of memorising skills, actions, language etc. It's kind of like working with a blank slate. The more natural skills you teach a child between those years, the more likely they are to become naturaly gifted.
On top of which, I always felt my school (my high school) never had a decent range of sports to play. We had Football, Rugby and Basketball, and that was pretty much it. I'm crap at Football, I'm crap at Rugby, and I'm passable, barely, at Basketball. I would have loved to do something like boxing or Ice Hockey (both sports I'm not too bad at), but my shitty school never had the option to try any of those things. Probably because they're considered "dangerous".
Like you said, we're so far behind American sports programs in this country it's not even funny. And we wonder why we never win anything on a global stage?
I think martial arts in school could only work, but I guess it'd have to be optional. Speaking personally, I knew so many kids at my school, as I'm sure everyone did, that were just pent up balls of anger. I know a few of them went to prison after school, some for really serious shit too. It might seem silly, but I wonder if they'd had an outlet at school, like boxing or wrestling or something, maybe they could have made something of themselves?
My Dad used to go to a really rough school in Manchester called St. Gregory's, and if the teachers there ever saw kids fighting in the playground, they used to drag them to the sports hall, put gloves on them and make them have it out in the ring, whilst they charged the other kids to come and watch. It worked too. Kids could settle their disputes without killing each other, and as a result, a lot of the harder kids got into boxing outside of school, which not only helped them vent, but gave them a sense of self discipline.
I bet that would have worked in my school.
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Post by Dan on Jan 25, 2008 21:03:02 GMT
I was watching a program on the teachers channel the other day (coz I accidentally went backwards through the channels from BB1) and there were some young people doing martial arts so i started watching it. Anyway it was a program about the sports programs in China, and basically the chinese government thought we suck at sport (20 years ago) and no one takes us seriously. So they put in place loads of sports academies for gifted youngsters (like specific volleyball schools etc) where literally the best in china would go and study their sport and get an education at the same time, and the actually education standard was apparently really high to although they did change all the physics textbooks to use volleyball or weightlifting or judo examples depending on the specific school which is very communist and they also made them go to boarding schools so they could fit all their training and education in which is ok in Chinese culture but less ok for westerners.
But anyway the point of the program was that it was the British education minister or somone looking at how they do it and how they went from being unsuccessful to producing some of the worlds best sports people. They acctually had some good ideas on the show which leads me to agree with phil that more should be done in the uk, however perhaps not to the chinese extreme. But a point they didn't make on the show that i taught was important is the fact there are 1 billion Chinese people so by law of averages they will have a large amount of talented people going on to the Olympics.
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james
Wing Chun Beginner
Posts: 40
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Post by james on Jan 28, 2008 13:35:00 GMT
hi guys. if you don't already know, i'm studying for my PGCE at the moment, and i know all about the over-politicised, PC-culture which is contemporary british education. so much so, that i'm considering leaving the exciting world of education as soon as i can. with such proliferant words as 'diversity, equality and differentiation' as their guide, the government seem hell-bent on undermining the achievements of hard working students by handing out A-levels for flipping burgers in mcdonalds. anyway, onto the main point. the problem seems most prolific in state schools in the UK, as i know most of the public schools around blackpool have excellent sport programs, Arnold in particular - they compete internationally at fencing and rugby, and joining one of the Cadets forces is compulsory. they can only do this, however, because they have something the state schools do not - funding. everything in education ultimately comes down to funding - from 'how many talentless drop-outs can we push onto a music performance course to get x units of funding?' to 'no, sorry, you can't have x piece of vital equipment, because we've spent all the budget getting the talentless drop-outs up to speed'. if such policies as decent sport programmes were introduced into state schools, they would have to be privately funded by lesson fees, and therefore could not be compulsory due to lots lots of over-PC factors. not to mention the health and safety people would have a fit at the very thought any kind of contact sport in schools. that said, it's a fantastic idea which would help the lazy, morbidly obese culture spreading throughout the uk, and would give cider-drinking troggs a reason to stay in school as they would presumably enjoy playing football and such. especially since the next great government initiative is to keep students in compulsory education until they're 18!! i think the start of the solution seems to be not in making sport compulsory, but in making it available at all levels. that's all for now, i'm off to write yet another fascinating essay on differentiation strategies. J  |
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Post by superfoot on Jan 28, 2008 16:22:08 GMT
Although it is nice to take a "Daily Mail" viewpoint when considering all this 'political correctness gone mad' it is important to remember why organisations such as schools have such procedures in place.
For instance (in an example related to education but not to sport) the case in 2000, when Laura Spence applied for an over-subscribed Oxford University course, and was rejected despite having 3 A-levels (the fact that many Oxbridge aplicants have 5 As was forgotten). A state school applicant (albeit from a middle-class background), it was alleged that she had been discriminated against by a procedure that included a personal interview. However if selection had focussed only on formal qualifications then it would be bureaucratic, and thus criticizable on the grounds of failing to take individual circumstances into account. The interview did take these circumstances into account, but was dismissed as elitist.
It was bemoaned as unfair that she had 'lost out' (in quarters that were horrified by the 'politically correct' rejection of competition in schools). The suggestion was that her state school background had made her the victim of bias (in quarters that defended the right of parents to buy a superior education for their children). But when Bristol University subsequently introduced a system to discriminate in favour of state school applicants by looking at their results in the context of the school they came from, which is to say a post-bureaucratic system to take account of individual circumstances, this was seen as 'political correctness gone mad' and outrageous 'social engineering'. Critics argues that university places should be allocated on exam achievement (a purely bureaucratic system).
The endless contestability of debate over bureaucratic and post-bureaucratic forms of organising can be seen within all organisations, but most noticably (thanks to the media) within the public sector. We can thus find other examples of this occurring, in health there are constant complaints about the bureaucrati targets set by meddling civil servants. Let indivdual hospitals determine what is best without the dead hand of bureaucracy. But when this happens, inevitably differences arise between different areas. This is then depicted as the scandal of the 'postcode lottery', to which the solution can only be centrally determined bureaucratic targets. Or in schools, "where the accusation in the 1980s was that these were adopting all manner of dogmas, with sex education undermining responsible family life; history being taught in terms of capitalist and colonisalist repression; EVEN SPORT BEING DENUDED OF THE COMPETITIVE ETHIC" (Grey, 2002). The solution was to introduce centralized, bureaucratic methods of quality assurance and the prescription of a national curriculum.
Roll forward to today and the complaint is that we have a restrictive, bureaucratic and centralized administration and the solution is to devolve power to school level. It doesn't take a genius to predict that if this solution is implemented then, in a few years time, there will be calls for centralized control to prevent the 'abuses' of local freedom.
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Post by rosenrot on Jan 28, 2008 16:39:23 GMT
Interesting posts...
I think Ad is referring to perception of the school system in general and most of the criticisms made regarding sensationalist reactions to news/statistics I'd agree with.
However, I don't think this changes my view on the way sport is taught and encouraged (or not as the case may be) in British schools.
RE: the 5 year olds at TKD comps. I think there's evidence of that sort of behaviour regardless of the sport in question or how violent the said sport is. Some parents just want to live through their kids and compete with other mums and dads and this will always be the case.
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Post by superfoot on Jan 28, 2008 17:18:20 GMT
phil is correct
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Post by Tom on Jan 29, 2008 13:27:30 GMT
I think a large part of why schools are failing is simply through a lack of options.
I'm of the belief that education should be tailored towards the individual, not the individual tailored towards education. Obviously you have to teach basic skills, like English and Maths, but further than that, I felt like I wasted a lot of my time when I was at school learning about subjects I couldn't care less about.
For example, at my school I had to take Geography for three years. Now whilst I concur that a basic knowledge of Geography is important, there has never been a single recorded instance where I've had to explain what precipitation is. Which is fortunate because I can't even remember. In other words, I feel like I was made to learn things that even then, as an angsty 13 year old, I knew were never going to serve me later in life.
The flip side of the coin is I wasn't allowed to study graphic design till I was in my 4th year, a subject which I not only excelled at at high school, but was genuinely interested in and would have quite happily pursued a career in (although that was dashed when I went to college, and they didn't have a graphics department. Again, lack of options...).
Same goes for sports. I was always shit at football. I still am. But there are sports that I'm good at, but I never got a chance to play at school. I mentioned Ice Hockey before. Now I'm aware that not everyone is going to be interested in playing Ice Hockey, so spending money on pads and the like was never really going to be an option. Not to mention the nearest ice skating rink was about 30 miles away. But I wonder, is there no interest in these sports BECAUSE we don't play them at schools, or is it really the other way round?
I'll finish by saying that my mum is a headteacher at a primary school, and it's been given numerous awards throughout the years for standards of excellence, but the only thing that really makes it any different from other state schools is that they let the kids learn what they want to learn, and they don't patronise them. French is now compulsory from a fairly early age, whereas a lot of schools are still of the opinion that it should be taught in high school only.
I'm not going to comment on the bureaucratic nature of the school system, because I don't feel I know enough about it to have a worthwhile opinion on it. But from my own personal experiences, I feel pissed off by how totally unyielding my high school education was to me. I would have loved to do martial arts at school, but couldn't because it was never an option. And I think that's shit.
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Post by wowposter on Sept 4, 2008 7:07:01 GMT
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