Centre d'Estudis Olímpics UAB olympicstudies.uab.es

Lectures on the Olympics

Olympic education (2004)

Norbert Müller

4. Coubertin's Olympism between education and ideology From Olympism to Olympic education

Coubertin says, "Athletics and the Olympic Games are the manifestation of the cult of the human being, mind and body, emotion and conscience. Will and conscience, because these are the two despots that fight for domination, the conflict between them often tearing us cruelly apart, because we must achieve equilibrium" (Müller, 1986b:418). It was for this reason that Coubertin was unwilling to provide an unambiguous definition of Olympism, but calls upon us to reflect on the meaning and value of the human body. Olympism is the entire collection of values which, over and above physical strength, are developed when we participate in sport (Malter, 1996). This principle contains the basics of a modern theory of sport education on an anthropological basis (Grupe, 1968, 1984, 1985; Meinberg, 1987, 1991). It is from Coubertin that we have the following paraphrase of the word "Olympism": "Olympism combines, as in a halo, all those principles which contribute to the improvement of mankind" (Coubertin, 1917:20). Coubertin's "Olympism" is therefore aimed at all people, irrespective of age, occupation, race, nationality or creed. Its general characteristic is that it brings together all men of good will, provided that they take their commitment to humanity seriously. It is, in Hansch Lenks's phrase, "multi-tolerant", allowing no ideological conflicts to arise (Lenk, 1972). "Olympic education" endeavours to provide a universal education or development of the whole human individual, in contrast to the increasingly specialized education encountered in many specialized disciplines. Consequently, it can only be based on the fundamental values of the human personality. Coubertin understood the Olympic Games as being the four-yearly "celebration of the universal human spring" (Müller, 1986b:288) followed that both participants and spectators had to be prepared for the festival. His concept of the process of training the Olympic athlete was based on the following pyramid principle: "In order for 100 people to develop their bodies it is necessary for 50 to practice a sport, and in order for 50 to practice a sport it is necessary for 20 to specialize; but in order for 20 to specialize it is necessary for 5 to be capable of outstanding achievement” (Müller, 1986a:436). Thus, the "sports education" propagated by Coubertin encompassed all young people and the population at large insofar as its members included sport in their search for the expérience personelle. He saw no contradiction here with his Olympic idea and Movement, since he had from the outset combined his educational and organization aims. Back in 1897, at the second Olympic Congress in Le Havre, those attending had been surprised to find themselves dealing not with details of future Olympic Games but with the propagation of sport and physical education in schools. Even in the aftermath of the unsuccessful 1900 and 1904 Olympic Games, Coubertin used the 3rd Olympic Congress of 1905 in Brussels to discuss models for the practice of sport and physical education in schools and other areas of life. After the breakthrough eventually achieved by the Olympic Games at Stockholm in 1912, Coubertin ventured to take on the universities, with a 1913 Congress in Lausanne on "Psychology and physiology in sport". Although this was asking too much of his IOC colleagues, concerned only with international sporting relations and the four-yearly Olympic Games, this was yet another demonstration of his more ambitious educational mission and his independence (Müller, 1994). "We must reach the masses" (Müller, 1986b) was the motto with which he reacted to the impression made by social revolution. Consistently, he said in 1918, "It cannot be enough that this Pédagogie Olympique – of which I recently said that it is based simultaneously on the cult of physical effort and the cult of harmony – in other words, on the taste for excess combined with moderation - should have the opportunity to be celebrated in the eyes of the whole world every four years. It also needs its “permanent factories“(Coubertin, 1918a). This quotation contains Coubertin's first reference to "Olympic education"; clearly, he was at this time convinced of the need for, and the conceptual strength of, his complex educational ideal. Away from his home country, he used the Olympic Movement for an international Olympic education network. When he wrote in November (Coubertin, 1918b) that "Olympism is not a system but an attitude of mind", he called at the same time for the consistent pursuit of an "Olympic education" in contrast to the traditional educational models which, in his eyes, were alien to sport. In 1921, when Coubertin tried to extend an urgently needed technical Olympic Congress in Lausanne to include a parallel event on sports education for the workforce, he failed to gain the support of a majority on the IOC. Coubertin pursued many schemes outside the IOC designed to create examples of such "production facilities"(Müller, 1975b). Before the First World War had ended, he had founded an Olympic Institute in Lausanne, offering practical education in sport and more general subjects to interned Belgian and French prisoners of war. He repeatedly called for the building of urban sports centres on the model of the "gymnasia of antiquity", and stressed the democratic role of sports clubs in which, he said, inequality between men did not exist (Müller, 1986b:592-593). His programme of Olympic education comprised including sport as a matter of course in the daily routine, to give the individual the opportunity "to adapt the good and bad aspects of his own nature to exercise" (Coubertin, 1920:223) and to orient his life in accordance with this experience. The public at large, as he proclaimed in his 1925 speech taking his leave of the Presidency of the IOC, should not be expected to indulge in the noisy worship of sporting idols without participating in sport themselves (Coubertin, 1925). He devoted the remainder of his life exclusively to new educational schemes. In November 11 1925, he founded the Union Pédagogique Universelle in Lausanne, which would hold conferences, seminars and other events connected with the educational mandate of the modern city. He also drafted a Charter of Educational Reform (Müller, 1986a:636-637) which in 1930 was passed through the League of Nations in Geneva to all Ministries of Education – without, of course, receiving any significant response (Müller, 1975b:75). As a specific counter to the decline of sport as a significant factor in education, Coubertin in 1926 launched – again from Lausanne – the Bureau International de Pédagogie sportive (Müller, 1975b:80) which published an annual bulletin and a number of books, including Coubertin's Olympic Memories and a new edition of his Pédagogie sportive. All of this passed almost unnoticed by the public, although Coubertin wrote more than 1100 articles and 30 books (Müller and Schantz, 1991). Even within the IOC, Coubertin was able to recruit only a handful of enthusiasts, and often criticized the leaders of the sports world as being technical consultants rather than defenders of the Olympic spirit. The educational aspect of the Olympic ideal only became public knowledge during the protracted debate about amateurism. For Coubertin, this very question was of no more than secondary importance: looking back, one might believe that the Olympic Movement spent all those years using this problem as a demonstration of its high ethical standards, in the same way as the doping problems of the present day. Coubertin thought differently: he was interested in the inner, moral, responsible attitude of the athlete to which the "Olympic education" was to contribute. As a repository of his educational efforts, Coubertin during his lifetime expressed the desire for a Centre d'études olympiques, which in fact came into being in Berlin between 1938 and 1944 under the control of Carl Diem, using funds provided by the Reich (Müller, 1975b:108-111).

Bibliography Coubertin, P. (1917?): Almanach olympique pour 1918. Lausanne: [s.n.] Coubertin, P. (1918a): “Olympic letter V. Olympic pedagogy”, en Müller, N. (ed.) (2000): Olympism: selected writings of Pierre de Coubertin. Lausanne : IOC, p. 217. Coubertin, P. (1918b): “Olympic letter IV. Olympism as a state of mind”, en Müller, N. (ed.) (2000): Olympism: selected writings of Pierre de Coubertin. Lausanne : IOC, p. 548. Coubertin, P. (1920): “Address delivered at Antwerp City Hall in August, 1920: sport is King”, en Müller, N. (ed.) (2000): Olympism: selected writings of Pierre de Coubertin. Lausanne : IOC, p. 222-226. Coubertin, P. (1922): Pédagogie sportive. Paris : G. Crès. Coubertin, P. (1925): “Speech given at the opening of the Olympic Congresses at the City Hall of Prague, May 1925”, en Müller, N. (ed.) (2000): Olympism: selected writings of Pierre de Coubertin. Lausanne : IOC, p. 555-556. Coubertin, P. (1979): Olympic memoirs. Lausanne : IOC. Grupe, O. (1968): Studien zur pädagogischen Theorie der Leibeserziehung. Schorndorf : Hofmann. Grupe, O. (1984): Grundlagen der Sportpädagogik: Körperlichkeit, Bewegung und Erfahrung im Sport. Schorndorf : Hofmann. Grupe, O. (1985): “Anthroplogische Grundfragen der Sportpädaogik”, en Denk, H. and G. Hecker (eds.): Texte zur Sportpädagogik. Vol.2. Schorndorf: Hofmann, p. 35-61. Lenk, H. (1972): Werte, Ziele, Wirklichkeit der modernen Olympischen Spiele. Schorndorf: Hofmann 2nd ed. Malter, R. (1996): “Eurythmie des Lebens als Ideal menschlicher Existenz. Bemerkungen zu Coubertins geschichtsphilosocher Anthropologie”, en Müller, N. and M. Messing (eds.): Auf der Suche nach der Olympischen Idee. Kassel : Agon, p. 9-16. Meinberg, E. (1987): Warum Theorien sportlichen Handelns Anthropologie benötigen?, Sportwissenschaft, 17, p. 20-36. Meinberg, E. (1991): Hauptprobleme der Sportpädagogik: eine Einführung. Darmstadt : Wiss. Buchgesellschaft. Müller, N. (1975b): Die Olympische: idee Pierre de Coubertins und Carl Diems in ihrer Auswirkung auf die Internacional Olympische Akademie (Vol.I) (Dissertation Graz). [S.l.] : [s.n.]. Müller, N. (ed.) (1986a): Pierre de Coubertin: textes choisis. Vol.I “Revélation” . Zurich : Weidmann. Müller, N. (ed.) (1986b): Pierre de Coubertin: textes choisis. Vol.II “Olympisme” . Zurich : Weidmann. Müller, N. (1994): One hundred years of Olympic Congresses 1894-1994. Lausanne : IOC. Muller N. and O. Schantz (1991): Bibliography: Pierre de Coubertin. Lausanne : CIPC. Related links -

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