ABSTRACT
The Olympic Games offers the world a moment to see itself – both as it is and how it could be. This mixture of dreams to aspire to and interrogate is the basis of the educational value of the Games. Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Movement, viewed the Games as a cultural and an educational event – a legacy that is reflected in an Olympic Organising Committee’s obligations under the terms of the Olympic Charter to further Olympic education during the host city’s Olympiad. All host nations are committed to providing an education programme in schools, but the way in which this programme is created is left up to host organising committees (for 2012, the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games – LOCOG) who are relatively free to design the programme as they wish. Get Set, the official London 2012 education programme, has attempted to provide a framework to realise this learning opportunity in schools across the country by providing a supportive structure and incentives for schools to learn about the Olympic and Paralympic Games through a specially designed website.1 The programme has developed its own approach, which reflects the diversity of education providers for 3-19-year-olds in the UK, the norms within the country’s education system and the new ubiquitous access to broadband-enabled devices. The programme has aimed to be more ‘open’ than previous Olympic education programmes in three key ways. First, it has bought the Olympic and Paralympic Games into one combined set of resources for schools. Second, it has forefronted the Olympic and Paralympic values and offered them to schools2 as a starting point for projects, but has not been proscriptive about how they are to be used. Third, it has offered learning providers incentives, resources and instructions through a specially designed website and has aimed to facilitate their learning in a network. At the time of writing, this model has produced impressive levels of interest from schools, but it also raises questions about the depth of young people’s learning and the type of relationships that schools have gained through the programme. The nature of supporting education through a network, especially one that has touched so many schools, is such that it is hard to account comprehensively for what young people have done and how much they have learned. But in any case, at a time when the Olympic Movement has increased its efforts to reach out to
young people through the Youth Olympic Games, Get Set should be seen as an attempt to ‘open up’ and involve wider groups in the experience and creation of London 2012. Lessons could be drawn from the Get Set experience and applied to other areas of the educational and cultural work related to the Olympics.
