Sport education, critical pedagogy, and learning theory: Toward an intrinsic justification for physical education and youth sport

I argue in this paper that sport should be retained as an important part of the educational rationale for physical education. I consider Siedentop's critique of physical education and his alternative in the form of Sport Education. Siedentop's goals for youth sport and physical education and use of the work of Alisdair McIntyre are explored. It is argued that if we work to experience activities that are inherently pleasurable and intrinsically satisfying, then there is a possible future for activities such as sport. I conclude that school physical education is well placed to take up this challenge of sustaining sport as a moral practice and that the pedagogical tools already exist to do this in the form of a critical pedagogy. After all, what would be the point of work or of political brinkmanship or, for that matter, of life, if there were no pursuits we humans find intrinsically satisfying that make life worth living in the first place, that is, worth all the struggle and hardship that are an inescapable part of life. And since play, games, and sports are best conceived, as the philosophical literature suggests, as just such intrinsically good things, they are among the most important and serious of human activities, and they are the very activities which things like work derive whatever seriousness they possess. All of which suggests, that when physical educationists endeavour to secure the academic legitimacy of their subject in (...) instrumental ways they are barking up the wrong tree. (Morgan, in press).