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Olympic education and Olympism: stillcolonizing children’s mindsHelen Jefferson Lenskyj aa University of Toronto , Toronto , CanadaPublished online: 25 Jun 2012.

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Olympic education and Olympism: still colonizing children’sminds

Helen Jefferson Lenskyj

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

The terms Olympic education and Olympism encompass a variety of educationalinitiatives aimed at children and youth in school and community settings, inaddition to courses taught under the heading of Olympic Studies in college anduniversity institutions. In this article, a critical analysis of these initiatives is pre-sented, as well as reviewing the relevant secondary literature, including thesmall but significant number of research studies that develop a genuine critiqueof Olympic education and Olympism. The mythology surrounding idealisticOlympic education is exposed, with a focus on the generally unquestioned valueof Olympism as a key tool in character-building and moral education. Recentexamples from resources developed in the United Kingdom, United States, Can-ada, Australia and New Zealand are examined, and implicit and explicitcorporate messages embedded in these materials are identified and critiqued.Recommendations are made for progressive educators whose goal it is tochallenge Olympic industry hegemony in schools, colleges and universities.

Keywords: children; citizenship; ethics/morals/beliefs; Olympism

Olympic education and Olympism

Every city bidding for the Olympic Games is required to provide an Olympic edu-cation strategy. These usually involve Olympic-related themes that are introducedthroughout school programs: for example, social studies projects, art competitions,sporting activities, and inspirational talks by Olympic athletes who are assumed tobe good “role models” by virtue of their sporting achievements. A trend that hasbeen in evidence since the 1990s is the widespread distribution of Olympic-themedcross-curriculum materials and resource kits to school children and teachers, insome instances reaching every child in the host country. Commissioned by nationalOlympic committees or Olympic academies,1 these materials are produced by a mixof school personnel, university faculty, and/or private consultants, with corporatesponsors footing the bill and promoting their own brand. Moreover, Olympic brandrecognition and loyalty are key features of these publications, albeit cloaked in“Olympic values” discourse.

The concept of Olympism, central to Olympic education, is defined in the sec-ond Fundamental Principle of the Olympic Charter as “a philosophy of life, exaltingand combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind” (IOC1997). “Olympic internationalism,” a key feature of Olympism, is said to promote

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“cross-cultural understanding, mutual respect, and ultimately, world peace” (Muller2004, 11). Olympism is a concept that has generated an excess of pseudo-religiousrhetoric, with de Coubertin’s innermost thoughts on the subject elevated to the levelof holy writ. For example, one reads sentimental references to educational principles“that de Coubertin dreamed about” (Culpan 2008, 6; see also Binder 2005; Kam-peridou 2008; Muller 2004) and imprecise claims that he “seemed to understand theimportance of emotion and imagination as pedagogical tools” (Binder 2005, 14).

Critical thinking – missing in action

Despite its proponents’ repeated claims that Olympic education falls under theheadings of moral, civics, values, and/or peace education – all areas of studythat rarely lend themselves to simple, clear-cut right or wrong answers – thedevelopment of critical, analytical skills and nuanced thinking is largely absent.Rather, it is taken as a given that the Olympic “movement” is a model of fairplay, international harmony and peace, with Olympism and Olympic education asits crusading outreach arm. Significantly, the benign term movement in contempo-rary social science contexts suggests a progressive social movement rather than athoroughly corporatized and globalized sporting and television spectacle. Hence,education about the Olympic movement may appear, at first glance, to be adesirable enterprise in terms of both curriculum and pedagogy. The last two dec-ades, however, have witnessed increasing global resistance to the orthodox Olym-pic industry narrative, and a small number of critical sociologists have subjectedOlympic education and Olympism to a much-needed exposé of its underlyingmessages.2

In the area of critical thinking, the most notable absence in Olympic educationalmaterials is any analysis of the Olympic project itself. Despite the fact that actualsporting competition is merely the tip of the Olympic industry iceberg, these materi-als focus primarily on sport and its purported character-building values. In light ofthe Olympic industry’s tainted history, I would argue that relying solely and uncriti-cally on Olympic sport and Olympic athletes to transmit moral and ethical lessonsto children and youth has inherent problems. In fact, it is difficult to imagine howan educational initiative that has its roots in a corrupt system – the Olympic indus-try – would be considered capable of imparting moral lessons of any kind.

This point has been made by numerous scholars over the years. For example,examining the contradictions between the ideals of Olympism and the realities ofthe modern Olympics, Maguire et al. (2008) concluded:

The ‘legacy’ of the modern games is consumption. The legacy ‘message’ becomesembedded in a broader process of commerce whereby the media/marketing/advertis-ing/corporate nexus is concerned less with the values underpinning Olympism per seand more with how such values can help build markets, construct and enhance brandawareness, and create ‘glocal’ consumers/identities. (Maguire et al. 2008, 2041)

Critiquing the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC’s) 2000 Celebrate Humanityinitiative, Maguire et al. (2008, 2045) demonstrated how this consumerist campaignwas cloaked in values language to imply that it promoted “the spread of humanrights and democracy” and improved “intercultural understanding.” They suggestedthat “Celebrate Consumers” would be a more fitting title (Maguire et al. 2008,

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2048). Similarly, Giardini, Metz, and Bunds (2012) labeled the campaign “the glo-bal branding of ‘multiculturalism’” demonstrating how it ignored different culturesand ethnicities, glossed over conflicts and exploitation, and replaced these complexi-ties with a vision of Olympic universality as race-less, class-less and egalitarian. Onthe related issue of sport as the route to development and peace – “sporting human-itarianism” – Giulianotti (2004, 355–369) documented a long history of the misuseof sport to promote nationalism, sexism, racism and xenophobia, as well as theneo-colonialist agenda underlying Western countries’ imposition of their sportingpractices on developing countries.

Idealistic Olympic education

An idealistic approach characterizes most Olympic education initiatives, and its sup-porters often rely on pseudo-religious language to inspire younger generations tostrive towards excellence and to follow their dreams, promoting Olympic athletes as“role models” to achieve this goal. A New Zealand Olympic Academy publication(2000), Understanding Olympism, repeatedly urged students to strive to be the bestthey could be in the spirit of Olympism, a combination of religious rhetoric and thepower of positive thinking.

According to one proponent, idealistic Olympic education focuses on fair play,equal opportunity, amateurism, international tolerance, and “the harmonious devel-opment of the whole human being” (Muller 2004, 11; see also Wassong 2006). Thefact that few of these features characterize contemporary Olympic sporting practice– indeed, equal opportunity was never a key tenet of the organization – is not seenas an obstacle, on the grounds that it is more important to strive towards these ide-als, even if they are not achieved (Muller 2004). An example of this idealisticapproach can be found in Binder’s 2005 paper, “Teaching Olympism in schools,”which presented five themes for teachers to use in values education:

• Body, mind and spirit: inspiring children to participate in physical activity• Fair play: the spirit of sport in life and community• Multiculturalism: learning to live with diversity• In pursuit of excellence: identity, self-confidence and self-respect• The Olympics present and past: celebrating the Olympic spirit (Binder 2005, 8)

Certainly, the first four themes are uncontroversial, but it is difficult to see whyOlympism is presented as the optimal starting point for teaching these kinds ofmoral lessons. On the question of multiculturalism, for example, a recent nation-wide Australian survey, Challenging Racism (2011), demonstrated that, rather thangenerating enthusiastic cultural mixing, sport ranked well behind the workplace and“social life” as a place where respondents mixed with members of other culturalgroups.3

“Olympic literacy”

Olympic education for children tends to favor the “empty vessel” approach to peda-gogy, comprising the simple transmission of “Olympic knowledge” through ortho-dox histories of past Olympics and biographies (usually hagiographies) of famousathletes aptly labeled in a recent critique as “olympic literacy.” As Kohe (2010)

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explains, “olympic literacy” encompasses Olympic “words, ideals, phrases, motto,symbols, goals and aims”(488).4

Even at the college and university levels, the notion of “Olympic knowledge,”including the technical components of Olympic bids and preparations, is a featureof many Olympic Studies programs. A 2005 report from the Autonomous Univer-sity of Barcelona’s Centre for Olympic Studies consistently defined Olympic Stud-ies in terms of “knowledge and information,” while components such as evaluation,analysis, or critique that might be expected in a university program were largelyabsent. The report went on to state that university-based “teaching and training pro-grams can be used by Olympic Movement organizations as tools to educate profes-sionals and leaders” (Autonomous University of Barcelona 2005, 11, emphasisadded). If one replaces the phrase “Olympic Movement organizations” with “Coca-Cola organizations” or “Communist organizations,” the ideological nature of thisstatement becomes very clear.

De Coubertin’s legacy

Contemporary versions of Olympic education and the underlying concept ofOlympism draw largely on the nineteenth century writings of French aristocrat andfounder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin. He viewed the edu-cation of children and youth as key to social reform, and ultimately, to France’sfuture, with sport as the vehicle for promoting fair play and internationalism. Hisuncritical faith in sport, or rather, in the mythology of sport, continues to shapethe views of Olympic education proponents today. For example, in 2010, IOCVice President Mario Pescante claimed that “young people, women, the disabled,disease prevention, human solidarity, and the fight against crime and violence”were among the myriad global groups and global problems that the IOC, in part-nership with the United Nations (UN) through the UN Inter-agency Task Force onDevelopment and Peace, would target. On the same theme, IOC President JacquesRogge stated:

The IOC and the Olympic Movement have a social responsibility to bring sport andits values to all fields of society. If sport on its own cannot drive this agenda, it canhowever exchange and partner with those whose responsibility and expertise is tomake peace and drive national development, such as the UN. (First UN-IOC Forum,2010)

Such statements rely on de Coubertin’s view of Olympism and Olympic educationas an instrument of social engineering, with sport, in contemporary contexts, pre-sented as a way of addressing problems as diverse as teen pregnancy and war inthe Middle East.5 It is disturbing to note that there is a lack of critique – in fact,there is significant support – for these largely unsubstantiated claims within the aca-demic community (Kohe 2010). Perhaps this trend is not too surprising withinmainstream Olympic Studies contexts, where the entire Olympic enterprise tends tobe celebrated, and where reliance on national Olympic organization funding mightlead to a less critical stance.6 However, one might reasonably assume that academ-ics whose specialized field is education, including physical education, woulddemand evidence-based research before building a curriculum on such shaky anddated foundations.

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Critical reviews of Olympic education

The author first began examining Olympic education in 2004 in a conference papertitled “Olympic Education Inc.: Colonizing Children’s Minds?” Since this was theauthor’s first venture into what could have been a potential minefield, the questionmark was added as an indication of some possible doubt on the author’s part(Lenskyj 2004). Seven years later, as the author continued examining this issue, thequestion mark has been omitted. The 2004 analysis included Canadian Olympiceducation materials and uncovered a pattern of uncritical presentation of Olympicfacts and figures, despite the frequent references to Olympic values, namely, excel-lence, trust, diversity models, fun, fairness, respect, human development, leadership,and peace. One example was a publication titled Count on Character: Kindness,Honesty, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Anti-racism (“a classroom guide to goodcitizenship and deportment”) that was distributed free to teachers and schoolchildren by the Toronto Star newspaper in 2001.

Along the same lines, the Star distributed Winter Gold: A Newspaper-basedStudy of International Winter Sports, yet another publication uncritical of all thingsOlympic (Hale and Golden 2001). The authors stated that a newspaper shouldinform and educate by “going beyond the basic facts with in-depth analysis.”Although they claimed that these materials provided students “with opportunities toimprove their media literacy skills,” (Hale and Golden 2001, 1) there was the usualemphasis on Olympic-related knowledge, rather than on the development of skillsassociated with media literacy. In contrast, a media literacy resource guide pub-lished by the Ontario Ministry of Education more than 10 years earlier noted theimportance of teaching students to deconstruct political and ideological messages,and the publicity and media hype surrounding special events, including majorsporting spectacles (Ministry of Education 1989, 57).

In the late 1990s, secondary sources that critiqued Olympism and Olympic edu-cation were very limited; two 1998 Australian conference papers (Magdalinski andNauright 1998; Schimmel and Chandler 1998) represented the most insightful anal-yses. Examining social studies materials on the Olympics generated in Australiaand the United States in the 1990s, Magdalinski and Nauright found a series of“potted histories” in which historical facts are presented in a way “that is virtuallyfree of politics and social inequality and one that provides isolated examples toillustrate broad assertions about Olympic ideologies or olympologies.” Similarly,they demonstrated how discussions of Olympic sport present a view of “decontextu-alised and dehistoricised sport disguised as a virtual religion of Olympism”(Magdalinski and Nauright 1998, 7).

Identifying the exploitation of children in the service of the Olympic industry,Schimmel and Chandler pointed to the fact that, during Sydney’s bid for the 2000Olympics, 160,000 Australian school children had been mobilized to sign petitionsurging the IOC to select Sydney. Furthermore, with Olympic sponsors contributingto the well-established “corporate invasion of the classroom,” they demonstratedhow the extensive “partnership-sponsored educational materials” distributed to Aus-tralian schools conveyed a clear message to children: “The Olympics are wonderful,we are lucky to be chosen as hosts, and we have the IOC and its corporate sponsorsto thank” (Schimmel and Chandler 1998, 11). Although corporate targeting and pro-motion of brand loyalty among children and youth has been well-documented (e.g.Canadian Teachers’ Federation 2006; Klein 2000, 2004), analyses of Olympic

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branding efforts targeting children rarely appear in Olympic- or sport-relatedscholarship more than 10 years later.

A 2006 report of the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, Commercialism in Cana-dian Schools, summarized problems arising from public schools’ increasing relianceon corporate sources. As well as noting the ethical problem of “the corporate take-over of the classroom,” it pointed to the lack of educational quality control: “Whoensures that the curriculum/classroom materials being provided to schools by corpo-rate sources are unbiased, complete and accurate?” (Canadian Teachers’ Federation2006, 24). Materials generated by Olympic-related organizations, and/or contractedout by these groups to commercial publishers, are not necessarily screened byschool boards, with the result that Olympic industry interests are well served, whilethe goals of critical education are not.

A 2005 publication by Magdalinski, Schimmel, and Chandler, titled “RecapturingOlympic mystique: the corporate invasion of the classroom,” expanded on their ear-lier critiques of these trends. As they reported, twenty-first century businesses, goingbeyond mere school-based advertising, enter sponsorship relationships with schoolboards, with “corporate-friendly curriculum materials” constituting “product advertis-ing packaged as pedagogy” (Magdalinski, Schimmel, and Chandler 2005, 42). Unsur-prisingly, the Olympic industry’s major corporate sponsors ensure that their logos arehighly visible on all such “educational” resources, usually on every page. Sydney2000’s Olympic Schools Strategy, sponsored by Coca-Cola and IBM, included aresource kit that was distributed to every school child in Australia. A more insidioustrend in these kinds of resources is the purported “values” content. As Magdalinski,Schimmel, and Chandler demonstrate, through its “Olympic values” educational ini-tiatives and its “Celebrate Humanity” campaign, the IOC “is not just selling corporateidentity, but it is also commodifying social conscience” (even attempting to secure aNobel Peace Prize) (Magdalinski, Schimmel, and Chandler 2005, 49).

Olympic education: some examples

In 2004, the British Olympic Foundation produced a web-based product, OlympicEasynet Education Pack, that included some overtly political topics, including the “Hit-ler Games,” Black Power, the 1980 boycott, and apartheid, but most of the web linksfor further research led to the British Olympic Association’s official site http://www.olympic.org/uk, which in turn relied on orthodox IOC materials. The general tone wasconservative; for example, all Olympic-related protest was labeled “disruption.”

The same year, the Royal Bank of Canada sponsored the Canadian OlympicEducation Program, distributing free copies of the Athens 2004 CanadianOlympic Resource Kit to 12,000 children in grades 4–6. Its stated goal was to linkOlympic themes, values and information to the grades 4–6 curriculum, but therewere very few direct references to ideals or values. The historical section took theusual superficial “potted history” approach, and only the positive impacts of hostingthe Olympics gained mention. In an exercise on “Organizing your own OlympicGames,” the fundraising guidelines merely showed students how the marketplaceworks, with no mention of ethical issues.

A 2004 teachers’ guide published by the Australian Geography Teachers’Association, Sports Geography: The Athens Games, stood alone as the onlyOlympic education source at the time to take any kind of critical stance. Exercisesand discussion questions promoted critical literacy among students of all ages,

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raising issues of economic and social costs as well as benefits, and asking studentsto debate the question of government funding for elite versus recreational sport.The section on Olympic preparations in Athens even included a news item on the2003 public sector workers’ strike, with the World Socialist website http://www.wsws.org listed as reference.

To update this review of the status of Olympic education, the author will nowlook at a resource that was a component of the extensive Olympic School Programsponsored by the Royal Bank of Canada in 2010, the year Vancouver hosted theWinter Games. A booklet titled “Money Management: Save, Share, Spend” (2010)made little effort to disguise the banking connection (and, to ensure the branding,the Royal Bank of Canada logo appeared on every page). After explaining bankaccounts and compound interest, it gave an example of investing into “an accountthat pays 4% compounded annually” (obviously a fictitious example in 2010, whenCanadian savings accounts were unlikely to offer even 2% interest). A furtherexample promoted the concept of profit in the guise of fundraising, asking studentsto calculate how much they should charge for a slice of pizza in order to meet theirfundraising target. The goal was to raise money, not for a charity that serves apressing social need or a disadvantaged group, but for the Canadian Olympic Foun-dation, a charitable foundation that supports athletes, because “earning a medal canbe expensive.” True – according to one analysis of costs, “If you want 20 goldmedals, then spend [Australian] $800 million every four years” (Beijing Olympicmedal price, 2008). A more progressive teacher might ask students to calculate howmuch affordable housing could be built in four years with that large sum.

The state of play and the ongoing challenges

An English language literature search in 2011 revealed a very small increase in crit-ical sources, compared to a relative surge in positive articles on the effectiveness ofOlympic education from scholars in recent host cities/countries, most notably Chinaand Greece. However, even those numbers were small, probably because fewOlympic scholars examine education, and few education scholars are aware ofOlympic education at all. As a result of this gap within the two fields of scholar-ship, Olympic industry messages can flow unimpeded into classrooms.

New Zealand physical educator Geoffery Kohe (2010) has provided one of themost scathing indictments of Olympic education material to date, as well as present-ing persuasive evidence of the influence of Olympic propaganda on the academy. Inan analysis titled “Disrupting the rhetoric of the rings,” Kohe aptly identifies “thepower of olympic propaganda to win over devotees in the face of a less than savouryhistory of the olympic movement” (Kohe 2010, 4). Analyzing New Zealand’s Olym-pic education materials as well as “the rhetoric adopted by advocates for olympism”internationally, he concludes, “Critical perspectives on the olympic movement do nothave a voice in olympic education resources, least of all those developed in NewZealand” (Kohe 2010, 484). It could be further argued that attempts to fit Olympisminto moral education or values education are doomed at the outset, regardless of thehigh-sounding rhetoric and good intentions of those educators who are struggling todo so. The Olympics have long failed to represent ideals of fair play, equal opportu-nity, or international harmony, if indeed they ever symbolized these values. Instead,bribery, corruption, commercialism, drug use, and gender discrimination are amongthe numerous systemic problems plaguing the Olympic industry.

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Furthermore, to hold up Olympic athletes as positive examples (“role models”)for children and youth is problematic. In addition to the flawed assumption that suc-cessful athletes are necessarily worthy of emulation as moral human beings, theseare men and women who have been aptly described as genetic anomalies, not as ajudgment but simply as a statistical reality (Deonandan 2005; Too fast to be awoman, CBC TV 2011). No amount of training, determination, and pursuit of the“Olympic dream,” without the prerequisite genetic gifts, will have the desired out-comes, and it is dishonest to send this message to impressionable children andyouth.7 Nor can it be assumed that the playing field is level, and role model dis-course routinely fails to recognize socio-economic and other barriers to sportingsuccess. Finally, there is no shortage of celebrity athletes posing as role modelswhose behavior fails to satisfy even basic standards of good sportspersonship, fairplay, cooperation, respect for others and respect for rules, and who demonstrate lit-tle interest in international understanding (Feezell 2005).

Although many Western countries have witnessed conservative trends in educa-tion since the 1990s (“back to the basics/no frills”), some school boards continue topromote education for democratic citizenship, with Canada, the United States andAustralia providing encouraging examples (Cook and Westheimer 2006). AsBickmore (2006) explains

To contribute to citizen education for democratic agency, explicit curriculum can andmust delve into the unsafe but real world of social and political conflicts and injusticesthat defy simple negotiated settlement, including the roots and human costs of currentlocal and global injustices. (383)

The aim of radical democratic civic education, as it is termed in the Australian con-text, is to promote “democratic classroom practices that revolve around encouragingthe sort of critical reflection that empowers students to challenge conventional wis-dom and authority” (Howard and Patton 2006, 463). That this approach is antitheti-cal to most kinds of Olympic education is self-evident, and all responsibleeducators, including faculty in universities and teacher training institutions, have aduty to challenge the corporate invasion of the classroom and the blind celebrationof all things Olympic.

In the author’s previous research, the puzzling question of educators’ generalreluctance to challenge the Olympic industry has been addressed, as well as themagnetic pull that the Olympics exerts over many academic researchers. In relationto the college and university level, the so-called “jock-sniffing” phenomenon hasbeen discussed (sport sociologists who perceive their own prestige to be enhancedwhen they mingle with high-profile Olympic athletes, IOC members, etc.), and,more significantly, the material benefits accruing to researchers affiliated with cen-ters for Olympic studies, and the constraints, either real or perceived, that they mayexperience. At the school level, with the ongoing problem of over-worked teacherson whom new demands are increasingly made, it is not so difficult to understandthe attraction of ready-made curriculum materials and offers of presentations byOlympic athletes, in contrast to the time-consuming task of developing their owncurriculum units that are critical of the Olympic industry. However, all educatorscould take an important step towards challenging Olympic industry hegemony byposing two key questions: “Who pays?” and “Who benefits?”

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Notes1. Olympic academies are national leadership development programs organized in member

countries, and “designed for current and future sport and community leaders … to learnabout and discuss the achievements, issues and current status of the Olympic Move-ment.” http://www.cnw.ca/fr/releases/archive/June2008/19/c6179.html

2. For a more detailed analysis of Olympic education and Olympism, see chapters five andsix of the author’s 2008 book, Olympic Industry Resistance: Challenging OlympicPower and Propaganda (Lenskyj 2008). In these chapters, several Olympic educationinitiatives are critically evaluated, including those developed in Canada, Australia, NewZealand, the United Kingdom and China. The problems arising from the related “rolemodel” programs are also examined, in which celebrity athletes, including Olympic ath-letes, are assumed to be optimal moral exemplars for children and youth, usually by vir-tue of their sporting achievements alone.

3. About 30% of respondents to the Challenging Racism: The Anti-racism Research Project(2011) reported that they never or “hardly ever” mixed with members of other culturalgroups in sport circles, while only about 17% and 20% gave this negative responsewhen asked about cultural mixing the workplace and in their social life, respectively.

4. Kohe has followed earlier critics’ example of using a lower case letter for olympic, onthe grounds that the modern games bear no resemblance to the ancient games held atOlympia, and hence cannot claim “the veneration of capital letters”; see Bale andChristensen (2004, 3).

5. The alleged connection to pregnancy prevention was made in some American sources inthe 1990s and popularized in Nike advertisements, with little evidence that there was acausal relationship. The concept of the Olympic truce is commonly misinterpreted as theequivalent of a cease-fire in modern warfare, but had its origins in the time of theancient Olympics, when athletes travelling to Greece were given safe passage throughbattle lines. Sport as a force for character-building and peace (sporting humanitarianism)is an unquestioned tenet of the UN Inter-agency Task Force on Development and Peace,Right to Play, and numerous other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (see UnitedNations Inter-agency Task Force on Sport for Development and Peace 2003).

6. For a full discussion of the connections between universities and the Olympic industry,see Lenskyj (2002, chapter six, 2008, chapter one).

7. In fact, within the field of biotechnology, tests have recently been developed to identifythe genetic traits in children that predispose them towards success in a particular sport;see “Gene test gives kids sporting chance”, Sydney Morning Herald (May 19, 2011).http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/gene-test-gives-kids-sporting-chance-20110519-1ev1t.html

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Australian Geography Teachers’ Association. 2004. Sports geography: The Athens games.Camberwell South: Australian Geography Teachers’ Association Limited. http://www.agda.asn.au.

Autonomous University of Barcelona. 2005. Networking in Olympic studies: Current situa-tion and proposal for development and cooperation (Summary). Barcelona: UAB.

Bale, J., and M. Christensen, eds. 2004. Post-Olympism? Questioning sport in the twenty-first century. New York: Berg.

Bickmore, K. 2006. Democratic social cohesion (assimilation)? Representations of socialconflict in Canadian public school curriculum. Canadian Journal of Education 29, no. 2:359–86.

Binder, D. 2005. Teaching Olympism in schools: Olympic education as a focus on valueseducation. University Lectures on the Olympics, Centre for Olympic Studies, Autono-mous University of Barcelona. http://olympicstudies.uab.es/lectures/web/pdf/binder.pdf(accessed January 16, 2007).

British Olympic Foundation. 2004. Olympic education pack. http://www.easynet.net/teamgb/education/ (accessed May 30, 2006).

Canadian Teachers’ Federation. 2006. Commercialism in Canadian schools: Who’s callingthe shots? Ottawa, ON: Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives.

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