Comparative Physical Education and Sport: The Area Defined.

Overview & Synopsis

The emerging field of comparative physical education and sport, or international physical education and sport, rests squarely on the shoulders of comparative education; an understanding and appreciation of the latter is necessary for an understanding of the former. Comparative education is an older field of study and has gone through certain stages in its development. They include: "primitive" comparative education; a period of cultural borrowing; the exchange of information about education from nation to nation; studies of national character; and increased use of the methodologies of the social sciences. (The author quotes extensively from many scholars in the field who represent diverse viewpoints on the methodologies, aims, and purposes of comparative education.) Comparative physical education and sport has emerged in recent years as part of the interest in the sociocultural or humanitarian aspects of physical education. Comparative physical education has gone through the same stages as comparative education but with a lower quality of scholarship. Movement into a scientific approach has been slow and spasmodic. What is evident is that though the field of comparative physical education and sport uses the techniques of history, philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science, and though the work has obvious interdisciplinary aspects, it is more than any one of the social sciences. (SK)