Is PE really responsible for the distaste of many French people for sport?

“Seven years of PE classes being picked last and feeling like shit.” “PE did not make me love sport, it made me disgusted with it. It was years of anxiety, stress, refusal to participate.” “I never exceeded 10. It was humiliation after humiliation”. Start a conversation on social media about school sports and you’ll hear dozens of stories like this.

Emmanuel Macron may have wet his jersey at the beginning of January, boxing gloves on his shoulder, to promote 30 minutes a day of sporting activity, the damage is done for generations who cannot see a pair of painted sneakers. A survey by France Stratégies and the Kantar institute on the French relationship with sport proves that PE plays a major role… in the disgust that many of them feel for physical activity (and the sweating that goes with it). This risks complicating the task of making our country a sporting nation, the main commitment of the Games Organizing Committee (Cojop) in terms of legacy, once the Olympic flame is extinguished after Paris 2024.

Why so much hatred? Let’s take advantage of the Olympic and Paralympic week, from April 2 to 6, to dust off your clichés about PE teachers. Forget the double of Monsieur Mégot, chief torturer of the Petit Spirou class. A threadbare tracksuit revealing a prominent paunch, an obvious attraction to the deckchair and excessive ambitions for moderately motivated students. “It’s the older generation”smiles Romain Mornet, PE teacher in Mayenne and high-level athlete, who is trying to qualify for the Paris Olympics in the 1,500 m.

A discipline that has evolved a lot

“There was a first turning point in the 1980s, when EPS left the supervision of the Ministry of Youth and Sports to find itself attached to National Educationagrees Guillaume Dietsch, author of the book Young people and sport (De Boeck editions). We have gradually moved from the teacher-coach model to that of the teacher-teacher, with purely academic objectives. But it took years for the change to fully take place.”

The gap remains in the minds of people, particularly parents, hence the frequent confusion between sport and PE. However, the subject was baptized “physical and sports education” because its aim is, according to official texts, to “train a lucid, autonomous, physically and socially educated citizen, with a concern for living together”. Far, very far from the champion factory dreamed of by Maurice Herzog (then Minister of Sports) and his boss, General de Gaulle, after the crash of the French delegation at the Rome Games in 1960 (five medals, none gold). ). A dated vision, which politicians know how to seize at the moment they deem opportune, as during the episode of famous tweet from Jean-Michel Blanquer during the Tokyo Games in 2021.

The former Minister of Education boasted about having contributed to the rain of French medals in team sports, via PE classes. “It wasn’t the two tiny hours of PE per week in my middle school schedule that made me want to play basketball.”replied the basketball player Evan Fournier, himself the son of a teacher of this discipline.

Athletes high-level people who say they found their vocation at school are not legion, but still exist. Among them, the rower Emma Lunatti (rowing), in the race to qualify for the Paris Games, or the pole vaulter Ninon Chapelle, who says: “I am 13 years old, I am in 4th grade at Jean-Renoir college, in Bourges, and a PE teacher who has just been transferred to the region offers students who wish to try pole vaulting. I try. And there, I don’t really know what’s going on, but I love it.” Not simply the result of chance since the teacher in question, Agnès Liverbardon, was one of the best French pole vaulters in the early 2000s.

Stadium tours in the cold are a thing of the past

The program also experienced quite a facade renovation: no more stadium tours, in the polar cold of a dismal athletics track, one January morning. “Discipline has adapted a lot to new practices. We offer step, weight training, crossfit, parkour… We are connected to young people’s practices”underlines Ghislain Hanula, teacher pioneer of playful activity in the teaching of sport, whose methods have been adopted at the highest level.

“We still offer middle distance, but we find fun alternatives like athletic biathlon [épreuve combinée de course à pied et tir au pistolet laser]“, illustrates Romain Mornet. He nevertheless concedes that “the endurance cycle is still not the students’ favorite.” Parades exist to eliminate the competitive aspect which is increasingly frightening: relays, races between middle school students of the same level or an evaluation based on the teenager’s performance, in particular. “The idea is that there is no longer just one gold medal, but one gold medal for everyone”, summarizes Ghislain Hanula. A little “fan school” side which contrasts with the baccalaureate grading, where until recently, 14 of the 20 points on the scale concerned the student’s raw performance.

Slower, lower, lower

Paradoxically, if PE has reinvented itself to attract students, all the teachers interviewed by franceinfo denounce a collapse in the average athletic level. Supporting public health study: the physical capacity of young people aged 7 to 18 has decreased by 25% in half a century, according to a survey carried out in 2020 and relayed by RTL. Three years later, researchers established that 6th graders ran much slower than their counterparts thirty years ago.

“If I ask for the same intensity as in 2000, I lose half of the students. The number of overweight children is much more significant than twenty years ago. How many collapse after two minutes of running foot ?”

Ghislain Hanula, PE teacher

at franceinfo

Here again, teachers must redouble their tricks so as not to cause those who are suffering the most to drop out. One example among others: “We started playing 3×3 basketball [qui se pratique sur demi-terrain]not because it is fashionable or on the program of the Gamespoints out Ghislain Hanula. But because the reduced terrain allows the students struggling to run less and touch the ball more.”

With a volume of hours falling freely over the course of schooling (four hours in 6th grade, three hours for the rest of middle school and two hours in high school currently), difficult to work miracles for students who only put on shorts in homeopathic doses. More than fifty years ago, Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas nevertheless affirmed: “It is at school that we should naturally develop a taste for sport. In secondary education, we want to achieve five hours of physical education per week.” We are far from it.

“We Finds himself with P.E. at the same level in 2024 as in 2017, the year we won the Gamesdeplores Sébastien Nadot, former deputy for Haute-Garonne, who had the stars of the XV of France Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack as students. There are not fifty solutions other than increasing the number of hours. And it’s like the numerus clausus in medicine, we would have seen the effects after seven or eight years. We had to get started before 2020. After that, it was too late.”

“All we can do is talk to the converted”

Even the famous 30 minutes of sport in primary school, praised by the executive, are not really effective everywhere. Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra estimated establishments not yet at 10 or 15% “entered the device” last September. “As usual, we had to make do with zero resources, zero training and zero helpsighs Céline Wilquin, director and teacher in CE1-CE2 in the elementary school of La Terrasse (Isère). In PE teaching, the ministry is non-existent, except when it comes to imposing standards on us. There, to do the APQ [les activités physiques quotidiennes], students are asked to lean on a corner of their table and raise their leg to do abs. It makes them laugh.”

Its school, located at the foot of the Chartreuse massif, regularly organizes ski outings “thanks to the goodwill of the teachers and help from the municipality”, she explains. A teaching which makes it possible to initiate a number of students, but not to catch up with those who will remain screwed on their sofa. “I have lost my illusions about that. It depends above all on the place that parents give to sport. And we see more and more students being exempted from skiing.” An indicator on the rise from primary school, according to her. “All we can do is talk to the converted,” also deplores Guillaume Dietsch.

“The 30 minutes of APQ in primary school, the experiment with two additional hours in middle school or the ‘Great National Cause’ do not reach the audiences furthest from sport.”

Guillaume Dietsch, author of the book “Young people and sport”

at franceinfo

The APQ program ends upon entry into 6th grade. “A fun solution would be to set up a daily session of 15 to 20 minutes, avoiding the boring side by moving to music to get the heart rate up”suggests former MP Sébastien Nadot, while the WHO recommends one hour per day for 5-17 year olds. “The PE teachers would know how to do it, but we didn’t ask them anything.”

It would be a little unfair to single out EPS as solely responsible for the nation’s ills. Clubs and federations are currently falling through the cracks, while, all disciplines combined, they lost a million licenses between 2018 and 2022. This figure, still uncertain due to the long-term effects of the football crisis Covid-19 constitutes the best indicator of French sports practice, according to experts. “The clubs will have to reform themselves in turnpoints out Ghislain Hanula. For many young people, this translates into schedules, training and constrained objectives, with an approach focused on competition.” Will we have to wait for disillusionment at the Paris Games before the time has come for an examination of conscience on the practice of sport in France?