Description:
Sports, body and excercise between health and education. In thisarticle, we discuss a political tendency to consider sports and exercise in school and kindergarten to be the solution to the growing problem that children and young people are less and less physically active, thereby increasing the risk of growing obese and of acquiring life-style diseases. The tendency to emphasize and focus on just one single effect of physical exercise, namely its importance for our physical health, c alls for the need of a discussion of exercise, body and movement as educational topics. In this article, we present a didactic viewpoint that rehabilitates a democratic educational tradition, which integrates both cultural practice in physical exercise, general didactics and knowledge from several branches of science in the subject Physical Education. Examples from our own pedagogical research projects form the basis of our reflections on the implementation of educational thinking in practice.