What happened to good old British common sense?
BRITAIN used to be a commonsense country which seemed pleasantly immune to pseudo-intellectual gobbledegook. Our universities produced Nobel prize-winning scientific discoveries and our engineers concentrated on the wealth-creating advances which gave us the modern world.
Just how things have changed was brought home to me at the weekend when I read about an academic study by Anne Flintoff, who works at Leeds Beckett University. Her thesis, arrived at in conjunction with Fiona Dowling at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, is that school PE lessons are racist.
Or, to use their jargon, PE is “constructed as a predominantly white, unmarked space”. Teaching children sports, they whine, is “an extension of nationalism and the empire”. The games that are taught were all invented by “white privileged males”.
Even the concepts of “character building” and “fair play” are apparently born of white imperialism.
THEIR theory, wrapped in jargon – they say their aim is “to trouble the profession’s taken-forgranted truths about race in PE as integral to working towards the development of an antiracist subject” – has more holes than a tennis racket.
It is hardly a revelation that many sports were either invented or codified during Victorian times, when the British Empire was at its high noon. But if they grew into national pastimes via the playing fields of Eton and Rugby the fact is that they are now played and enjoyed by billions of people around the world.
Are these academics trying to say that South African fans taking part in the 2010 World Cup, where Nelson Mandela appeared at the centre of the closing ceremony, were somehow engaged in an act of their own racist oppression? Or that the many millions of Indians who enjoy cricket are unwittingly celebrating nationalism and empire? As for the charge that the concept of fair play stinks of white imperialism: are they saying that black people don’t share a desire for fairness?
I don’t know what pains me most: that British taxpayers