Have we been reducing the true value of our physical body in order to sustain the restricting and separative ideals of functional excellence?
The annual Sports Day… a hallowed tradition unquestionably and reverentially honoured by primary schools across the world. Parents ‘get behind’ their children to cross the finishing line, jump the highest or the longest, or throw the furthest while teachers scrutinise the rankings and placements of students to determine who is awarded which ribbon, which medal and who is the overall laurel-wreathed victor. The belief that this is not competitive and is just for fun circulates and allows all involved to avert their gaze from the clearly deleterious effects on the young bodies who are exhorted to do their best or try their hardest, whilst underneath it is known and felt that this is all about the coveted rankings and the positioning of all participants along a scale of success or failure. The role of the physical body in this process is that of a mere instrument for the projected desires of the mind, whilst the mind holds and maintains its lofty state of superior separation from its physicality.
The current worldwide model of education rests on this premise of the superiority of the mind (intellect), with the physical body being the subordinate executor of its commands. Within the body, the brain is perceived to be the organ of excellence and intelligence, whilst the remainder of the body acquiesces to what the mind has ostensibly conveyed through its favoured organ.
In this paradigm, any value assigned to the physical body is based exclusively on its functionality i.e., its ability to execute the many commands from central control. The fitness of the body becomes the ideal and the goal because the driving intelligence asserts that life is all about the survival of the fittest in terms of both one’s academic and one’s sporting prowess. In education and in society at large, health is perceived to be a question of this fitness and functionality, with the benchmarks of what constitutes health, or the fitness goals we are exhorted to aspire to, being derived from, and confirmed by, comparing one body and its capability to that of other bodies.
Hence the significance and veneration attributed to the annual primary school sports day.
Schools are a microcosm of the world at large where athletes are admired, feted, given scholarships to college and university and where successful teams receive lucrative corporate sponsorships. (1) Many a teacher has observed how the annual sports day, swimming carnival or cross country in schools have progressively become more and more in line with the pomp and ceremony associated with global sporting events like the Olympics. Whilst there are teachers who express that a primary school sports day is not run on IOC rules and standards, nonetheless the focus remains on which students will receive the coveted awards, the glittering cups and who will have their names added to the lineage of success on the perennial shields of sporting excellence.
The mindset of competition and separativeness is further compounded by the division of primary age students into school houses, whereby children who played contentedly alongside each other the day before the sporting event now become sworn enemies out to battle each other to the metaphorical death for the sake of the glory of their respective houses. Even a casual observer will notice how the ritualistically applied face paint, the necks strained in tension, the screaming out of war cries, the overly emphatic, aggressive gestures designed to drive the other teams into submission and to elevate one’s own team to a victory, all work together to establish a foundation of extreme competitiveness, divisiveness, of pushing one’s own team into a position of superiority that we currently refer to as ‘winning.’
The individuals within the victorious team win; their team wins and so the glorified term ‘winning’ becomes for all participants a euphemism for a state of radical departure from a sense of harmonious group interdependence.
Ultimately, this lays down the seeds for a lifetime of divisiveness and the mania of competitive superiority. Whether it be school team versus school team, school versus school, city versus city, state versus state or country versus country, it matters not as long as there is a sense of versus, of pitting oneself or one’s team against all others. Herein ultimately lie the roots of nationalism, where a nation’s pride and status is determined not by its humanitarianism nor by the wellbeing of its people, but by its prowess in winning and its successful comparison to the stigma of failure attributed to all others, with the all others being the vast majority of people, given that there can only be one winner.
Most of the world, and at least the majority of primary school students, take on these definitions of failure, these beliefs that their physical body is less fit, less competent, less skilled and quite simply inferior to the bodies of the victors.
One of the most significant beliefs that form the bedrock of this orientation to life is the belief that the body needs training and educating in order to achieve the desired state of superior fitness. In schools we talk about Physical Education, with this education referring to the acquisition of sporting skills, forcefully pushing the body to its limits and beyond, and justifying this under the concept of having a positive ‘you can do anything’ attitude. This is the aspirational ideal and the driving force that is communicated to primary age children by sports coaches, teachers and, most significantly, parents. The minds and bodies of the majority of primary age children take on this value set, these attitudes of mind, regardless of their positioning along this continuum of victory, mediocrity and failure.
Herein lies the truth of the configurations of failure in education: win or lose, fail or be victorious, it matters not. The real failure lies in the fact that our children become disconnected from the real and true intelligence of their physical body, an intelligence that needs neither training nor educating; rather what is needed is the educating and nurturing of a mind that accepts that its physicality (the body) accesses intelligence that surpasses its own mental ruminations and desires.
What is needed in education is the returning of the mind back to the understanding that the body is neither its instrument nor its plaything, but rather that the body needs to be listened to and responded to, to be afforded the deepest respect, profound levels of care and exquisite levels of love and nurturing.
This quality of connection with the body is the foundation from which our physicality expresses its own wisdom through the mechanisms of inner impulses and awareness. This wisdom is derived from the body’s connection with the living cycles (both local and universal) in which we are all embedded. From the daily cycle of night and day, to the monthly cycle of the moon; from the annual cycle of the seasons to the Great Cycle of Eras, we – and our bodies – are held by a multitude of harmoniously interwoven cycles and every body knows innately how to respond to their impulses and communications so that it, the body, is responsive to and fully expressing its part in this magnificent, divinely designed whole that constitutes the Oneness of us all.
Again, in this we see the truth about the real configurations of failure in education. We have substituted the magnificence of our connection with this Divine Order for the contrived pecking order of success and failure. This latter grading system is in fact de-grading to the intelligence of the body and its innate sensitivity and its ability to respond to the Divine Order of which we are inextricably a part.
A physical body restored in this way to its natural voice becomes the vehicle that houses an even greater expression – that of the essence that resides equally within us all. Our essence communicates through the physical body, re- connecting us with the fact that we are multidimensional beings with access to a Love based intelligence that goes well beyond the suppressive restrictions of three dimensional functionality, the lower mind and its mental constructs of survival of the fittest.
Whenever we subscribe to any construct of winning, we have all lost, including those who are ostensibly the victorious ‘winners.’ This actual and painfully real failure is not limited to those who did not win; failure is never restricted to the ubiquitous also-rans. We are all failing when we refuse to allow the body its true voice; we are failing when we do not nurture and honour the essence that resides within us all. We are all failing when we do not raise our children in and by its light and we are all failing when we refrain from expressing the profound love and harmony that we all are innately.
If we are beings of Love, then we are a very long way from home.
Why do we allow this incessant and forcefully driven mindset of winning, competition and divisiveness to sustain this distance from who we naturally are (?), particularly when it is this same force that actually lays down the real configurations of failure in education.
And yet we continue to say, it’s only a primary school sports day….
(1) Wilson, B. (2010). Football and fries: Why McDonald's sponsors sports. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-11332724 [Accessed 29 Dec. 2019].