We used to socalize our pupils or contribute to their social learning when they learn the ways of the group, become functioning members of it, act according to its standards, accept its rules, and in turn become accepted by the group.
We socialize youth by helping them acquire social experiences, social habits, and social relationships. Our interest is in the development of the social phases of personality, attitudes, and values by means of games, sports, and related activities.
Thoughtful people agree that emotional and social learnings are important, for real education is an emotional and social as well as an intellectual experience, and that there must be an effective curriculum for personal-social education that parallels and often intertwines the academic curriculum.
The direction for improving social education demands the utilization of insights and studies from many disciplines from which health education, physical education, and recreation draw their basic principles.
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We must, therefore, look not only to the research and thoughtful study of specialists in the areas of biology, psychology, and medicine, but also to the social sciences of sociology, cultural anthropology, and social psychology.
We can be scientific in our respective fields to the extent that we employ intelligent and persistent endeavours to revise current beliefs, weed out error, improve upon the accuracy of our beliefs, and search for the significant relationships between facts drawn from the several disciplines previously’ mentioned.
The method, not the content, defines the body of knowledge as a science. Physical education, health education, and recreation become scientific to the extent to which we apply the scientific method to the phenomena that are their subject matter.
There must be some cause and effect laws in the way human beings behave just as there are cause and effect laws in the way steel, rubber, or the atom behaves.
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Where do we look for these principles? The behavioural sciences provide possibilities by honest, exhaustive, intelligent, interdisciplinary searching for facts and their meaning or implications with reference to any given problem in our field.
In the area of psychosocial development it is exceedingly difficult to establish functional relationship between numerous variables involved. This makes the task of validating causative explanations of individual behaviour a terrifically challenging and difficult one.
In is hoped that the numerous studies drawn from the several disciplines attempting to show the effects of physical activity upon the personal and social adjustment of people will be examined with careful scrutiny and realization of the paucity of significant definitive research which bears on this important problem of the social dividends of education.