“Do School Prospectuses Promote the Wrong Features of Sport?”
Reunion Values – or Prospectus Values?
Sport plays an important part in school reunions. Whether formal or informal, a gathering of people with their schooldays in common rarely omits reference to experiences on the playing fields. Although they are not universally positive – many are.
What do people value about their experience of sport at school? Which memories are sufficiently powerful to be etched on the mind, and to have survived years of intervening activity? And lasted far longer than the hastily collected facts that rammed reluctantly into the memory to facilitate exam passes?
Most involve a social dimesion. “Playing with my mates” is the most frequently quoted positive recollection of school sport. And this is not ability dependent. High performing teams value this as much as their counterparts in much less successful schools. Neither is it activity specific. It appears to be a characteristic of all games, sports and physical activity. Shared endeavour, commitment to a group goal, tolerance of discomfort along the way, empathy, humour – and occasional moments of long-remembered triumph.
The “great games” are another fond recollection. Again, not necessarily always the games of the highest technical standard, but those in which the outcome was uncertain throughout, in which both teams contributed to a positive atmosphere. Where practised skills and strategies might have clicked into place, and where combined efforts produced an unusually satisfying result. Emotions appear to have a vital role in ensuring that occasions are memorable, and the highs and lows of sport seem to stimulate this much more than endless easily forgotten academic facts.
Few are the reunions that are not punctuated by the “Do you remember when?” recollections. Often these are the moments of magic. The unpredictable occasions when something rare occurred: sometimes an elusive flash of sublime skill or a turning moment in a competition – but equally often a moment of hilariously unanticipated incompetence or extreme discomfort.
These are some of the many features of school sports experience that have an amazing, and unparalleled, ability to withstand the erosive influence of time. Part of the universal attractiveness of school sport.
Perhaps surprisingly, these are not what is promoted in school websites and prospectuses. Lifelong memories, friendships forged in mutual endeavour and long-recollected moments of magic are curiously absent. As is the stimulation of a life time love of games and physical activity. Instead prospectuses focus on logistics: lists of sports played, pictures of shiny facilities, technically imperfect pictures of staged sporting moments. Websites are very good at capturing the features; facts which appeal to the intellect, not the emotions. Programme details are prominent, and lists abound. These are not the benefits that stir the soul.
There is an odd – and widespread – disconnect between reunion values and prospectus features. The difference between emotion and intellect. Promoting prospectus features is easily achieved, but does little to capture the rich and enduring appeal of sport. Rare (to the point of unique) is the PR material that informs prospective parents that, “Sport in this school aims to produce elevating memories of special moments, enduring friendships forged through shared experience, plus a lifelong love of sport and exercise”