Sports and television: a perspective from the physical education

Abstract

Nowadays, the important role of the sport in our society is undeniable. From the Physical Education point of view, we must take its values and we must transmit them to our pupils. Let us think that it is not sufficient with presenting sports at school, but it must have a direct transference that affects our pupils’ free time transforming it into an active leisure, because the Physical Education has the purpose to achieve the integral education of the pupils. In this sense, it seems necessary to form good spectators to be critics with which they see and that they value the principles of all sport activity and to appreciate the different sport manifestations they attend, contributing to form different opinions to achieve an integral education. The mass media, and particularly the television, present a set of values that turn around several axes (exit, competition, consumption, possessiveness). The television must have the purpose of entertaining, of informing and of educating; but if we compared the values that arise from the sport competitions emitted on television with the values that we tried to promote at schools, we could question ourselves if they are at the same level, or, on the contrary, they aim in opposite ways. The sport activity occupies an important role in the leisure of the young people, on the one hand as a sport practice and, on a second hand, as spectators of sport events. From our subject, we want to contribute providing a meaningfulness to these activities for our students and, to reach, as Pierre de Couvertin said that all the sports were for everybody, pleading for a global sport in which any limit of age, physical condition, sex….