Marc Perelman is an architect and professor of aesthetics at Paris Nanterre universities. He is the author of
2024, the Olympic Games did not take place
(Les Éditions du Détour, 2021).
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When entering sixth grade, one in two children living in Seine-Saint-Denis cannot swim. It is a reality to which we should add that many more children, still in sixth grade, cannot read, write or count. And after the sixth? The swimming argument is repeated and even rehashed over and over again to justify the Olympic Games and their competitive organization to the point of becoming a sort of slogan. Yet we are entitled to wonder what concrete link exists between school and competitive sport? Should there also be one? How can the Olympics and their prestigious equipment, reserved for the elite only, have anything to do with school training? This is true both for the Stade-de-France and for the competition pools already built and to come. Besides,the inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis and the youth of this department have never been able to tread their green lawn or swim in their chlorinated waters.
These equipments have no training effect on the practice of sport.
And it is not the pride of owning a stadium that pushes many young people in this department towards sporting competition, but rather the explosive combination of massive unemployment, the continuous media hype of all political parties, especially on the left. around the supposed benefits of "Paris 2024" and the emergence of a de facto non-existent "Generation 2024", and finally the mirage of sporting success and the happiness that accompanies it in the context of intellectual pauperization linked between others to illiteracy.
Read alsoJO: Paris 2024 at the foot of the immense Olympic challenge
Seine-Saint-Denis is the barrel of the Danaïdes: money is poured in continuous streams in a department subjected to high-dose injections of competitive sports and
ad hoc
places
(swimming pools, stadiums, etc.) . For decades, the left, led by the Communist Party, has repeatedly said that sport - and therefore the Olympics - would save the department from social collapse. However, that only made matters worse. Because more sport, more sports equipment, more sports elite, means committing considerable budgets which, in no way, promote the improvement of the living conditions of the inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis, nor improve school education for children.
As the budgets devoted to sport increase, the cultural desert grows: how many libraries, bookshops, art galleries, how many artistic and cultural formations have been created in the last thirty years in the “9 -3 ”? So little. While the money is flowing to establish elite sports equipment in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest department in France, a huge sports ghetto is forming in which thousands of young people are struggling. illusion of the social lift through the grace of competitive sport. For a Mbappé, how many young people on the floor after having bet on the local club which should have made them reach the peak of glory? These same young people who will have dropped out of school, the only real training framework for all,stunning and obstinate together in a competition that will leave them all their lives with a sense of frustration and without any training, including professional. A time bomb !
Read also Paris 2024: obsession with controlling the budget
In his time, Prime Minister Alain Juppé had bet on the effectiveness of the Stade de France to solve the social problems of Seine-Saint-Denis, create an "
impetus
", he prophesied.
Almost all the municipalities of Seine-Saint-Denis were then engaged in programs related to the dissemination and integration of sport in schools.
Sport integrated school and even became like a school.
Twenty-five years later, the observation is striking: the department has more unemployment, more violence and more poverty.
The school, by its only institutional power (its structure, its teachers, the knowledge provided), it allows everyone to follow a course which provides them with a sufficient cultural and intellectual base to enable them, later, to develop skills in a very wide range of trades.
Marc Perelman
The recent controversy surrounding the role of schools in training the sports elite is indicative of a biased debate. While for the Minister of National Education, school is the institutional base on which the elite must rise, for others it is not: the elite is formed mainly outside of school. in clubs. The debate is distorted from the outset. The question that arises is rather the following: should the school be the place of the training of the sports elites? That is to say the place of the distinction or even of the separation and very quickly of the irreversible division between the children themselves, on the basis of their only bodily capacities (strength, agility, endurance ...) implemented by the fierce competition in which they engage? School, on the contrary,allows each child, whatever their morphology and aptitudes, to find their place. It welcomes, of course, all those who have difficulties of all kinds: social, financial, linguistic ... And by its only institutional power (its structure, its teachers, the knowledge provided), it allows everyone to follow a course. which provides them with a sufficient cultural and intellectual base to enable them, later, to develop skills in a very wide range of trades.it allows everyone to follow a course which provides them with a sufficient cultural and intellectual base to enable them, later, to develop skills in a very wide range of trades.it allows everyone to follow a course which provides them with a sufficient cultural and intellectual base to enable them, later, to develop skills in a very wide range of trades.
On the contrary, the competitive logic of sport divides; it separates children between performers and non-performers. It is literally undemocratic and discriminating and it fuels a totalitarian type matrix since it puts forward the strongest and leaves the weaker aside. It is in the very essence of sports competition to eliminate the other. Worse, if one can say, the sporting competition exacerbates and redoubles all the inequalities between the children (physical, intellectual, moral…). Preventing the other from playing sports, such is the paradox of the unchanging logic of sports competition. The school is, or should be, the main place of incubation of democracy: everyone must be able to learn and know how to read, write and count and, indeed,why not learn and know how to swim. But learning to swim, a physical activity, does not oblige or imply in any way to undergo the competition.
Read alsoJO: Blank mocked by two Olympic medalists after a tweet about sport at school
It will be recalled that at the initiative of the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research, and through a circular sent on August 22, 2016 to all French schools, the year 2017 was called to become the “
Year of Olympism, from school to university
”. In order to motivate schools, four main objectives were chosen: “to
promote sports practices at school […]; promote sport as an educational tool […]; enhance the cultural dimension of sport […]; mobilize sport as a tool to strengthen the links between educational establishments, their environment and associations […]
. " There again, a lot of money spent, a school taken hostage and ordered to promote sports competition. The recipe never worked.
