Cathy Devine writing about school sports and PE.
Most girls and many boys are uninterested in competitive sport. The Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University reports that, when 60,000 people aged 11-18 were asked which three sports they would like more of, the top three for girls were ice skating, dance and swimming; and the top 10 included no competitive team games. Even for boys the top 10 choices included only two competitive team games.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I detested team sports at school and was marginalised because of it. However, I do recall in the latter years of my primary education, one of the teachers conducting a straw poll of the class. She asked how many of us didn’t like football. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, actually, rather a lot of us didn’t like it. Not the majority, I seem to recall, but enough to make me realise that I wasn’t some kind of freak.
My preferred sports were judo and archery, neither of which necessarily included teams – although they could. And I was pretty good at both. I’ve decided that once we are back in the UK permanently, I’ll be getting my bow out again. I need some new arrows, though.
And this “Survey” was conducted by the same arseholes who are demanding tax payers money to study five years to carry out this kind shite?
Remember this everyone when you NEXT feel the urge to suporrt the shitebags rioting over grants and student funding.
Had yellow belt in Judo. Hated it.
I hated football too. As a boy you were just expected to know all the rules and how to play. I didnt and couldnt.
I also managed to avoid over two years of swimming with one sick note for a dodgy toe that healed in a couple of months. I hated swimming too.
Sport is an aberration actually.
A minority of people enjoy/are good at football; for another it’s cricket, or rugby or gymnastics, etc etc and some people don’t enjoy any type of sport, but whatever sport you choose (with the possible exception of boys and football) it is safe to say that a vast majority of people neither enjoy it nor are good at it nor enjoy even watching it.
I personally like swimming underwater. I don’t really like swimming on the surface. Crown green bowls is quite good fun as well. But that’s about it.
I loathed all sports as a boy, and resented the assumption that as a male I ought to love them. I was probably the only able-bodied kid in the history of British secondary education to get out of school PE completely for seven years simply by dint of digging in my heels and refusing to participate. After a few weeks of this, I was left unmolested to learn Spanish on my own in ‘private study’. God knows why they couldn’t allow everybody the option.
FT – that the research is iffy isn’t really the point here. More that it is making a fairly obvious observation; that tends to be ignored when forcing children to endure PE and games at school. And, of course, the arrogant assumption that we all want football rammed repeatedly down our throats at every opportunity.
Michael – I made junior green. That was probably as far as I was going to get. I was small, light and not particularly strong. None of this should have made a difference, but in reality it did. I also had another, more serious handicap – my tutors identified that I just wasn’t sufficiently competitive. For me, just taking part was enough. Winning was neither here nor there – a nice bonus, but if I didn’t it wasn’t a big deal. This was a serious set back for anyone wanting to progress.
Those of you who managed to get out of PE by fair means or foul have my admiration. I wish I had done likewise. Even as a sixth former – and a volunteer at school, PE was still compulsory and I resented every moment spent out on the freezing cold playing field, forced to participate in a pointless and stupid ball game.
Excuse me:
TEAM GAMES AND SCHOOL SPORT ARE FASCISM.
I too, remember being bullied on a wet, cold football field. I was lucky enough to excape at the start of the IVth-form, because I was to do some “O” -levels a year early!
Only ONE “sport” should be taught in schools: swimming – as an essential survival skill.
The pay-back came when I was 17 – the school took a trip to the Lake District. Only one pupil (me) made it out every day – weedy me, was fitter, and better at it than all the sports fanatics.
Interesting that.
Since then I took up fencing and archery – though I don’t do them any more ….
Meanwhile, DON’T get me started on either the “world cup”, or worse, the “Olympic Games” – Seb Coe just gives me the cold shudders….
Interestingly as a keen cyclist who cycled to school every day and went out on long trips when away from school, I was fitter than the football types, too.
It might have helped if the games Teacher had not been a psychopath. I was never against teachers having the right to smack a badly behaved pupil and still am not, but this miserable specimen had obviously become a teacher simply so he could hit children as hard and as often as he could. However, if one made county champion, it was all first name terms. The upshot of that last bit was that only those who were good at footy and running were allowed to try out other sports, such as tennis.
Come the 6th form we were allowed to choose our activities on a half termly basis. I chose cross country running as it was totally unsupervised. Off I ran to the sweet shop down the road, filled myself up, then jogged back.