Shooting Fish / Competitive Sport - 2 comments

What strikes me about journalists - and this seems to be particularly the case with bloggers - is the temptation to pick the softest of targets when a deadline looms, so that one's word limit can be reached with the minimum of original thought, and the maximum of boilerplate text that the intended audience will instantly recognise. Familiar concepts, familiar language, and familiar targets allow the reader to sail from beginning to end without feeling short-changed, with a vague feeling that something significant was said, even if they are unable to identify what the point was.

Sadly, this approach has a cancerous effect on comment-pieces that deal with Tony Blair. It is so widely believed that his authority is diminished, and it is so rare for commentators to defend him/his record, etc. that the journalistic bar has been lowered to not much more than an inch above ground-level. This is what makes reading Blair-themed blog posts (not all, just too many) so dispiriting: it's the fact that, time and time again, the opportunity to post a powerful critique is squandered in favour of something trivial; an opportunity to make a constructive point wasted; and it's the recognition of a writer patently jumping on the band-wagon.

Opportunists will defend themselves by stating that their target is power and authority, even when that power and authority is evidently now in name only, and their iconoclasm is applied only narrowly. Critics can also be accused of being loyal ("slavish", and "unthinking" are popular synonyms, depriving critics of their human faculties) to the target, incapable of independent thought.

Frankly I could pick a couple of Comment is free posts a day to illustrate this, but I just happened to pick on Dave Hill's post, Off the ball, the tagline of which makes the following extraordinary claim:

The prime minister's failings are never more sadly exposed than when he talks about sport in schools.

With the courage of a man confident he won't be challenged, Dave begins:

I've been meaning to respond to the PM's words ever since, but it's been hard to find the time, what with my long nights of weeping interspersed with bouts of hysterical mirth. [...]
As facile claptrap goes it may be small potatoes compared with his evasions over Iraq. [...]
Thus spake the pillock...

Having actually read the whole piece on the Labour web-site, I'd say it was a wide-ranging, and pretty reasonable coverage of the issue of sport in schools, covering societal change, health implications, Government funding and initiatives. It's also very long piece, not well-suited for a one paragraph summary. The aspiring journalist, however, spots the following paragraphs...

[...] for too long, a damaging argument was allowed to run. It said that competitive sport is bad for children. It was thought to be aggressive and set people apart from one another. Actually, like most areas of intense competition, sport of course teaches people to co-operate.

An unholy alliance between some well-meaning but misguided teachers and schools with a peculiar ideological view of sport and a failure to invest in the basic infrastructure of schools, let alone school sport, led to a slow decline.

... is waken from the lethargy that comes from reading something dull and worthy, and 15 minutes later the completed article is ready to be handed over. OK, I don't think anyone's claiming that his "unholy alliance" was universal by any means, but what I'd expect to see in a critique of this is an analysis of how competitive sport is bad for children, how it does encourage aggression, and does indeed set people apart from one another. What do we get?

It is and always has been utterly untrue that participation in competitive sports is automatically a good thing for children.

Who said anything about automaticity? Can you name one single thing that is automatically good for children? Perhaps competitive sport is good for 60% of children, and bad for 20%? If so, it would surely have about as much right to be on the syllabus as any other subject.

I say this as someone for whom the thrill of chasing some sort of a ball around a field was only ever rivalled in his schooldays by that of snogging, but who can also never forget the sheer, pointless misery the inclusion in the timetable of double games on a Wednesday afternoon represented to too many of his male peers.

Well, speak for yourself (though I find the snogging claim rather hard to believe). Either way, the popularity of sport among children tells us nothing about whether sport encourages good health, or aggression, or sets people apart from one another, and is therefore irrelevant to the issue in hand. If you expect school subjects to be popular, you can expect sweeping changes to the syllabus...

A truly brave and progressive physical education policy would start from the conviction that different approaches are needed for different sorts of kids, and that those who are suited to competitive team sports should get a social education in the process of participating in them.

So this is what it boils down to: we should encourage a range of physical education, with competitive sports available for those who like that approach, and those sports; non-competitive sports for others; and perhaps general health education for all. I don't know if this can be called "truly brave and progressive", it seems pretty uncontroversial, and doesn't seem even remotely to contradict Tony Blair's words.

It's great that we can find a consensus on an issue like this - just a pity that we have to wade through so much pointless rhetoric, personalised attacks, and point-scoring to get there.