The ‘cultural discount’ of traditional martial arts in physical education: mechanisms of meaning loss in Chinese secondary schools

This study examines how traditional Chinese martial arts experience systematic cultural discount when institutionalized within secondary school physical education curricula. Applying cultural discount theory, originally developed in media economics to explain value loss when cultural products cross boundaries, to educational contexts, we investigate the mechanisms through which meaning is lost when embodied cultural knowledge encounters formal schooling structures. Through a qualitative multiple-case study of four secondary schools in Jiangxi Province, China, involving 47 participants and 48 lesson observations, we identify three interconnected discount mechanisms: curriculum fragmentation and technicization, temporal compression and assessment regimes, and spatial dislocation and environmental decontextualization. The findings reveal that martial arts undergo transformation from holistic cultivation practices integrating physical, philosophical, and ethical dimensions into disaggregated technical skills amenable to standardized assessment. Traditional training's extended temporal logic becomes compressed into bounded instructional units incompatible with embodied learning requirements, while culturally meaningful spaces are replaced by generic institutional environments. These mechanisms operate through what we term ‘institutional discounting’, systematic meaning loss generated by structural incompatibilities between traditional knowledge systems and modern educational institutions. The study contributes to sport sociology and curriculum theory by demonstrating how institutional contexts transform the meaning and nature of physical practices, and illuminates a fundamental paradox in heritage policy: formal institutionalization intended to preserve traditional practices may generate conditions that undermine their cultural integrity. The mechanisms documented here parallel processes of sportification and disembedding identified in the broader martial arts literature, suggesting that the cultural discount framework offers analytical tools with applicability extending beyond the Chinese educational context to any setting where holistic, embodied traditional practices encounter modern institutional structures.