Current Issues in Contemporary Comparative Physical Education and Sport

Comparative Physical Education and Sport is an area of study that provides very special insights into the changing globalising world that we live in. It is a modern contemporary field of enquiry in a very real sense. This book provides a collection of studies by authors from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America and Oceania. The authors are academics who have come together by virtue of their interest in Comparative Physical Education and Sport. The issues they address are contemporary because they are universal. The book is organised around three discrete focuses. The first is the deliberate embrace of sport as a vehicle for peace and development, vigorously promoted by the United Nations programs of recent years. The second is the field of physical education in schools. This is an area that has, according to several commentators, struggled in recent times to retain, let alone continue to build, its place in the school curriculum. This, despite the fact that there has never been a greater need for it, particularly in the developed world where the next generation is falling prey to the lifestyle diseases arising from physical inactivity and the over consumption of processed food. The third section focuses on sport management, specifically the growing need for trained professionals to lead and guide the ways in which sport is organised and consumed in the interests of the people within a competitively driven consumer orientated world. The interested reader is invited to consider the relevance of the views expressed and shared in these pages and reflect on the insights they provide as what physical education and sport might grow to look like, in the increasingly interconnected world of the future.