Is School a Sport? — Philosophy UNLEASHED

I am starting a new unit on Philosophy of Sport with my students and we are seeking a definition of what a sport is. Soon they will look at scholars in the area think the answer might be (people like Eleanor Metheny, Scott Kretchmar, Robert Simon, Andrew Edgar, C.L.R James, William Morgan, Emily Ryall, Stephen Mumford, Mike McNamee, and Graham McFee, among others), but for now I wanted them to think for themselves.

Various ideas were offered. To be a sport my students offered that there must be:

Some clearly defined aim.
Legitimate competition to achieve that aim.
Certain rules that need to be followed, creating some restrictions to achieving that aim, with penalties for breaking the rules.
Official enforcing bodies for those rules at some stage (even a playground kick about follows, for the most part, the rules of football at the top of some hierarchy).
A raised level of physical effort.
Scoring of some sort, so that there can be ranking, rewards, and possibly relegations.
A practice of training for the activity itself.
Some emotional investment, either from players or spectators.

And while some, drawing on their studies in Philosophy of Art and George Dickie’s “institutional theory”, suggested that sport is whatever “Sportsworld” deems to be a sport, other students quickly noted (as with the “Artsworld” hypothesis) that, to avoid the definition becoming entirely arbitrary, there needed to be some distinct quality of a thing that the Sports/Arts Worlds are recognising when they designate the particular thing as “sport” or “art”. A distinct definition is still needed to make sense of any criteria for inclusion.

(It was also noted that while “art” has built into it a certain level of gatekeeping and elitism, as we usually use the term “art” to designate higher achievements in certain creative activities than others, “sport” is supposed to be open to all. It is coherent to suggest not everyone can be an artist and not every creative output “art”, but seems incoherent to say not everyone can play a sport. Hence the function of a ruling “Artsworld” makes sense, whereas there seems no clear function to a gatekeeping “Sportsworld” here?)

We have still not fully agreed on a definition. However, to show that it still feels like something might be missing, I offered the following as something that meets our definition of a sport yet intuitively feels like it is not a sport: school.

School has clearly defined aims (qualifications) and specifically defined means to achieve those aims (here in England: through GCSE and A-level examination).
It is a legitimate competition to achieve those aims, as no one knows the outcomes in advance and even the most diligent preparation and practice might still lead to disaster on match day if the questions aren’t as you had anticipated. Being in a “good” school is no guarantee of success and a “bad” school no guarantee of failure. There are also many stages along the way where you might flounder and flail or make sudden unexpected comebacks (different year groups and challenges at that level of schooling) that create uncertainty and intrigue towards the final outcomes.
There are certain arbitrary and restrictive rules in school that you have to follow at all times (not just in those examinations, which might be considered the top flight of schooling, but all the way down to grassroots nursery level) and which you can be penalised for breaking in the form of warning systems, detentions, suspensions and exclusions. From uniform (kit) to conduct (play).
Alongside the official enforcing bodies of the exam boards, schools themselves are inspected by organisations like Ofsted or ISI, as well as having oversight from the Department for Education and boards of governors. The schools are ranked in league tables putting each school in further competition with others and students across the country in competition for the most elite rewards in what philosopher Robert Simon might call a “mutual quest for excellence”.
Anyone who has ever tried to endure a busy six-period school day knows that school involves a raised level of physical effort. Not only walking around the school site from lesson to lesson (and often doing physical activity in lessons thanks to faddish ideas about kinaesthetic learning that refuse to die!), but even having to play other sports during the school day in PE and Games lessons, or at break time. (One student here disputed that school could be a sport simply because of this fact. “You don’t play other sports while playing one sport” said the boy. “Decathlons” came the swift response.) There are also levels of physical control and restricted movement common to the aesthetics of sport within school, from uniform rules to arcane demands pupils stand and sit at specified times, such as during a school assembly. Access to toilets is also sometimes restricted, with the physical endurance associated there too. Pupils can eat, and sometimes even drink, only when told they can, and only in designated areas.
Scoring has already been discussed in terms of qualifications and league tables, but within different levels of school as a sport, individual students are scored in a range of assessment tasks across the season (school year), with data-driven reports being sent home and reward and sanction systems also being used to further score individual pupil success.
Schools excel as practice or training for the actual sport itself with a constantly self-referential regime of tasks aimed at getting students better at schooling, from exam preparation and the manifold ways that bleeds down into pre-examination years, to enforcement of school rules and norms. Outside of a pedagogical approach largely based on the principle of repeated practice, pupils do fire drills, lockdown drills, mock exams, practice essays, practice papers, taster lessons, open days, homework practice, and extra sessions at break or lunchtime.
One student argued that schools can’t be a sport because people don’t watch it. Beside the fact that many sports take place without spectators, from a game of squash at a sports club to a friendly international match played behind closed doors, we noted that the audience emotionally invested in the sport of school are the families and friends of the competitors. “How are they doing in school?” asks a concerned grandparent. “How was school today?” asks an interested parent. “Have they had their exams yet?” asks a family friend. These are the spectators of the sport of school, emotionally invested in the success or failure of their favourite players. And like supporting a sports team, some seasons are better than others. “My daughter had a tough time in Year 9, but I’m hoping Year 10 will be better” reads a lot like a Red Sox fan looking at the current 2026 season despairingly and hoping for better things in 2027.
A further element I added, because students had not yet seen Bernard Suits’ definition of a “game”, was the idea of a “lusory attitude”. Although students do not know that language yet, they agreed with the idea that students in school enter the “game” with the proper spirit of play. Even though the rules are arbitrary and the outcome often unfair, they all understand that this is the game and agree willingly to go along with the rules no matter how silly. They’ll put all their books in another room and rely only on their memory to write an essay in timed conditions and accept the outcome even though that might be perhaps the very worst way of producing a quality piece of work simply because that’s the game. Those who don’t enter the right attitude to schooling find themselves eventually expelled from playing.

On every criteria, school seems to fit the bill of being a sport. And whether we wanted it to or not, we struggled to find anything sport needed to have that schooling didn’t other than its general public acceptance as a sport from the “Sportsworld” we had already argued was unnecessary (if the world’s first rugby match took place and Sportsworld didn’t know about it, wouldn’t it still be a sport?)

The idea is an interesting one. And I leave it to you, the reader, to send me your own thoughts and arguments to see if you can prove it wrong. Is school a sport and all our pupils therefore athletes at various levels of competition? Or is it not? And, most importantly, could it be this very fact (school is a sport) that marks the distinction from schooling and education? Is all that is wrong with the school a symptom of it being focused on its sport, rather than the purer goal of educating young people? After all, there is no argument to be made that education is a sport.

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