Historical Evolution of sports Historical Evolucion of sports researchpdf | Page 28

Battle of Sedan=French defeat) France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War
greatly bothered every citizen of France, and even though Pierre was just a
young boy, he was disturbed by the defeat of his beloved country, too. He
postulated that it was the lack of physical education and training that made the
French soldiers weak and more prone to defeat at the hands of the more athletic
rivals, so at the end he became convinced that athletic prowess could save his
nation from military humiliation.
As he belonged to a rich family, he didn´t have any problem when choosing
from a number of career options. He finally decided to study at the Law Faculty
of the Political Sciences School.Pierre de Coubertin was primarily a pedagogue
and
his
foremost
aim
was
to reform education. In 1925 he was one of the founders of the World
Pedagogical Union.
From a young age he was really interested in education and its philosophy,
so he later became an educator and intellectual.As a teenager he used to read
English novels from where he learned of the sports-centered English public
school system of the late 19th century. He agreed with the English educational
system which promoted many sport values.
Intrigued, he travelled to England and studied its educational system. Influenced
by the study of Thomas Arnold´s conception and education, in which England
had integrated physical education and sports with academic curriculum, he
demanded ethical and moral values together with physical training in France
which in those days only focused on intellectual development. This
implementation triggered in the combination of sports, education and the idea of
world-wide peace. The last idea of universal peace was extremely relevant and
one of his main objectives, that´s why modern Olympic Games were built on
three pillars: elite sports, ethics and peace.Coubertin was convinced that peace
education
could
only
be
effective
if theoretical learning was accompanied by personal experience. Olympic sport
was the very means to achieve this aim. Sport in the sense should become an
instrument to reform economy and politics and thus society as a whole: “The
Olympic Games will be a potent, if indirect factor in securing universal
peace”.Yet, Coubertin was clearly drawn to the medieval period arguing that an
unintended Olympism nearly took root in the Middle Ages. He was especially
enamored by the esthetic, moral, and, indeed, religious context that informed the
athletic instinct during the Middle Ages, and he found in chivalry reified and
rhetorical echoes of the romantically conceived ancient Olympic cosmology that
so inspired him.
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF SPORTS
28