‘Knowing How’ And ‘Knowing That’ And Physical Education

It is one of the commonplaces of educational discourse that the sort of activities in which proponents of 'education through the physical' typically engage are far from being of the same kind as those of which the curriculum in educational institutions of all sorts is usually composed. Many teachers of other subjects think of these former activities in terms of 'bodily' rather than 'intellectual' pursuits, as species of 'trained' patterns of movement rather than 'educated' mental dispositions, as providing not more than 'relief from the really hard work of the academic disciplines proper or 'therapy' as a corrective to counter-productive or deficiency conditions to be found in pupils' environments and diets. The work of many highly respected educational theoreticians also provides material which, in the highly so·phisticated and tightly argued forms in which they present it, acts so as to reflect adversely on the claims of such activities for inclusion in educational curricula. R. S. Peters, for example, compares and contrasts games with what he terms 'serious' curriculum activities.2 As against such 'serious' theoretical activities as science, history, philosophy, and the rest, of games he avers that there is a static quality about them in that they ... have either a natural or a conventional objective which can be attained in a limited number of ways... In so far as knowledge is involved in games ... this is limited to the hived off end of the activity which may be morally indifferent.