Do sport and physical education have an important role to play in educational institutions?

This thesis will argue that sport and physical education plays a crucial role within the curriculum and hence needs to be a necessary part of educational institutions as much as any other subject area. If we are serious about an integrated view of the human person, then physical education is a necessary part of a well-balanced education. A central and reoccurring theme throughout my thesis is that we become aware of our embodiment through a family of physical activities in physical education that rebalances the disproportionate emphasis on the development of the mind and restores to education a balance that has been previously missing. Anyone disposed to regard the body lightly needs to recognise that the primacy of perception elucidates that the basis of our cognition is through bodily experience. This claim is a powerful one because it reasserts that human beings are not dualistic entities consisting of a mind and a body. More importantly it emphasises how human beings actively interact with their environment to make sense of the world, not from some passive contemplative perspective outside the world, but through being a part of the world. Greater recognition, then, needs to be given to the role embodiment and corporeal movement plays in student learning, particularly since our engagement with the world is not just limited to the cognitive domain and a large part of our interest in the world is emotional, practical, aesthetic, imaginative and so on. Consequently, I will argue that embodiment in education should be taken seriously because movement experiences in and through physical education can provide opportunities that are humanising and provide authentic opportunities to concretely reinforce the point that a person’s essential being is more than just his or her rationality; he or she is a being-in-the-world.