Ethnography, masculinity and value judgements: An exploration into rugby and educational research

I will venture to declare that a coalition with any code of rugby is antithetical to education; as well as one of the most pathetic means a number of teachers use, if and when they can, to abdicate from having to engage in the difficult and often not immediately rewarding task of trying to improve the social, cultural and intellectual horizons of their charges. This coalition is little if anything more than reduction of the potential educational exchange down to one of the lowest of denominators - rugby. It entails and encompasses the adoption, endorsement and thus social acceptance of something closely akin to thuggery. In its own way it is the reduction of culture to the level of the tabloids, and the reduction of values to those propounded by the commercial television arms of those tabloids.