Now PE branded racist by PC brigade
Claim of ‘whitewashed curriculum’ in study funded by taxpayers
SCHOOL PE lessons are racist, according to an astonishing taxpayer-funded study.
Teaching children to play football, rugby, cricket, netball and rounders favours ‘privileged’ white students, the politically correct 20-page report claims.
The research, which was criticised last night as ‘ludicrous’ and ‘patronising’ by a top black footballer, said sports that had been taught in schools for generations harked back to Britain’s colonial past and made ‘whiteness’ the norm.
Its authors, who were given a grant of nearly £10,000 to examine PE classes in Britain and Norway, suggested that learning dances from different cultures should be given a greater prominence.
They add that the emphasis in PE on health and fitness could even be imposing Western ideals of how people’s bodies should look. They claimed that ‘characterbuilding’ practices such as ‘fair play’ also had European roots. But last night former football star Les Ferdinand, a black player who is now director of football at Queens Park Rangers, derided the study as ‘ridiculous’. He said he was never aware of racism during his ten years of school PE and added: ‘Ethnic minorities have gone on to play football and rugby and they’ve all gone through the same PE curriculum. This research is a waste of money and of time.’ Lord Ouseley, who chairs the anti-racism football campaign Kick It Out, said it was ‘crazy’ to put such sports in ‘a context of ethnicity and racism’ as they were played all over the world, adding: ‘This research is an irrelevance and also patronising as people make their own decisions about their involvement in sport.’
The report – called A Whitewashed Curriculum? The Construction of Race in Contemporary PE Curriculum Policy – said traditional games had been developed in the Victorian era by ‘white privileged males’ at elite public schools that often discriminated against minorities.
Authors Anne Flintoff, Professor of Physical Education and Sport at Leeds Beckett University, and Fiona Dowling, of the Norwegian School
of Sport Sciences in Oslo, cited research that claimed to find British educationalists prefer to ‘pander to the feelings and fears of white people rather than aim to eradicate racism’.
The authors, who received a grant from the British Academy, suggest that by focusing on the need for ‘healthy, active lives’, there is ‘a danger PE lessons can contribute to a recolonisation of ethnic minorities’ physicality’.
They add: ‘It is through the monocultural and ahistorical language of discourses of fatness and fitness in schools that young people’s bodies, in subtle ways, are pedagogised to white ideals of the body.’