The Emperor’s New Clothes: Fat, Thin, and Overweight. The Social Fabrication of Risk and Ill Health

Abstract

It is now well over 60 years since the publication in Britain of the Board of Education’s (1933) Syllabus For Physical Training For Schools. It was a remarkable document, not only for the amount of detail it provided on the teaching of physical education, no doubt necessary for a teaching force then predominantly untrained to teach it, but also for the status it was accorded (then called physical training) in the elementary school curriculum. “The development of a good physique” and the provision of an “efficient system of physical training” were seen as nothing less than a matter of “national importance” as “vital to the welfare, even the survival of the race” (p. 8). The echoes of war, general economic recession, and widespread social deprivation unsoftened by the supporting structures of a welfare state had much to do with the Board’s emphasis on the production, promotion, and maintenance of fitness for health. Throughout the syllabus the social and medical functions of physical training loomed large. An efficient system of physical training could help compensate, but not correct, alleviate, or act as a “remedy for all (British economic and social) ills” (Board of Education, 1933, p. 8). Such was their magnitude that the Board acknowledged (in a manner not always so prevalent in more recent health reports) that physical training had its curative limits. Even so, it went on somewhat optimistically to claim that the syllabus could, “if rightly and faithfully used, widely adopted and reasonably interpreted, yield an abundant harvest of recreation, improved physique and national health” (p. 8). Physical education has long been associated officially with the development and maintenance of the health of school children in the United Kingdom (UK), as in the United States (US) and elsewhere (see Kirk, 1992, 2004). Over the past 20 years this association has become even stronger. Since the 1980’s “health issues” began to be featured regularly in the physical education literature, first in the form of expressions of commitment to “health related fitness,” later renamed “health related education” and, thereafter, increasingly in mainstream physical education programs in schools (see Fox, 1991; Penney & Harris, 2004). A commitment to certain elements of health education is now embedded in the National Curriculum for Physical Education (NCPE) to which all pupils between the ages of 5 and 16