Resistance in Physical Education: the direct or indirect path to the top of the mountain

Brilliantly illustrated by, for example, Hartmut Rosa (2021), new technologies in modernity are aimed at accelerating and making society more efficient by eliminating resistance. In civil society, this tendency is expressed by helicopter parents who devote their lives to relieving their children of their burdens. In the world of education, it is widespread to talk about facilitating or scaffolding learning processes. The purpose of education is often regarded as helping and supporting (mainly) children learning and developing life skills and competencies. In this regard teachers' job is scaffolding, facilitating and clearing the road for the pupils (Biesta 2022). Also, in sport and physical education the idea of facilitating and scaffolding is a well-known metaphor and practice.
In sports and physical education, we try to facilitate the acquisition of new skills by the athletes or students by, for example, showing them how to perform a volleyball serve or explaining to them how to lead the arm in a crawl. Sometimes we even ease the resistance by physically supporting students when, for example, they practice doing a front handspring in gymnastics.
But perhaps there is a risk that we miss an important value in human development if we are too preoccupied with making the path easy and removing all resistance on the way. Maybe we are too focused on the Life on Easy Streets (Kretchmar 2006). What if the trouble, the resistance, the challenge and the struggle are what make sport, physical education and maybe even life meaningful? It would be naïve and properly also very privileged to think of all resistance as meaningful. Sport is part of what we can call beyond necessity and in that sense resistance we choose ourselves. It is not self-evident that the resistance in a compulsory subject such as physical education is experienced as meaningful, but if part of the purpose of education is considered a matter of subjectification as Biesta has suggested, we can perhaps make the artificially created resistance more attractive to the students.
The Norwegian scholar Herner Saeverot argues that students will find teaching more existentially meaningful if it has a more indirect character. In direct pedagogy, the teacher designates the goal and aims to help the student arrive at the goal as easily as possible. In this way the students are deprived from choosing and the sweet tension of overcoming resistance. In contrast, the teacher in indirect pedagogic will inspire the students to find and choose their own crooked path towards the mountain top (Saeverot 2022).
The purpose of this presentation is to investigate how resistance can contribute to physical education being experienced as existentially meaningful. The presentation will elaborate on how teaching PE can avoid being a mountain too high to climb, but a mountain the students want to climb.