A Notable Endeavor: The Nature and Significance of Olympic Education in the Pre-and Post-Period of Beijing\u27s 2008 Olympic Games

This study investigated the nature and significance of Beijing’s Olympic education initiative from its inception seven years before the 2008 Olympic Games to 2015, seven years after the conclusion of the great festival. As exploratory research, this study is the first to cover this academic topic. In 2001, commensurate with Beijing’s award of the 2008 Olympic Summer Games, a non-governmental “grassroots team” initiated an Olympic Education and Olympic Spirit initiative in a small sample of Beijing’s primary and secondary schools. The team was led by a Canadian-trained professor, Dongguang Pei. In 2005, impressed with Pei’s and his team’s initiative, and following the International Olympic Committee’s guidelines for host cities mounting Olympic Education initiatives, the Chinese government endorsed and supported an Olympic Education Legacy initiative called the Olympic Action Plan. The Chinese government’s support of disseminating Olympic knowledge to 400 million Chinese youth nationwide presented Chinese schools, the IOC, and the world with a model for a comprehensive, vigorous, and what some have judged a highly successful public and private school Olympic education program. Compared with the unique Olympic education program presented throughout the seven year period before and during the 2008 Olympic Games, in the seven years following (2008-2015), the carefully and energetically-built program of Olympic Education deteriorated badly. The Chinese government abandoned its leadership and enterprise in sustaining Olympic Education. Based on the investigation sample, “Olympic education activities” in the program’s “model schools” deteriorated abruptly after 2008. Funding, Olympic Education teacher training, and international school partner associations ceased. On-site observation and interviews resulted in the finding that Yangfangdian Central Primary school, the pioneer school of Beijing’s Olympic education, remained the only model school which retained Olympic education activity after the iii 2008 Games. During the post-Games period, Beijing’s Olympic education was replaced by new government approaches to education. This study needs to be understood within China’s unique social, educational and political climate. On the one hand, a centralized political system ensured that Olympic education be implemented under extremely powerful organizational orders. These orders guaranteed not only financial and human resources support, but also the climate for Olympic education to expand extremely quickly through multiple administrative levels. On the other hand, and correspondingly, the disappearance of Olympic education after the Games was, most certainly, due chiefly to the government’s withdrawal of initiative and support. It is a justifiable conclusion that the Chinese centralized system, though enabling the program at its outset and early development periods, in the end rapidly constrained the entire initiative