Olympic pedagogy is Olympic learning in four subject areas, embracing integral development of sporting, social, moral and intellectual education, which promotes individual sporting ability as accomplishment, as competition and as fair play, as a means of developing various positive social experiences and moral value orientations for the individual pupils. Experience of the ethico-moral principles of the Olympic idea in sporting activity, plus knowledge of moral behaviour and knowledge of the values and ideals of the Olympic movement, should enable pupils to experience and learn moral conduct in sport and should also convey knowledge about such conduct and shape their conscience for their daily life. These task complexes address standards and values in sport and in children’s and young people’s daily life. As an individual development task, children and young people should come to link subjective sporting ability, social conduct, moral behaviour and Olympic knowledge with the objectively desirable fundamental and historico-pedagogic behavioural standards of the Olympic principles. Sporting effort, social conduct, moral behaviour and Olympic knowledge can be considered as four subject areas of an ascending spiral curriculum, i.e. each subject area is equally important, they are mutually dependent and thus complement each other. In this way they together define the integrated approach to Olympic education. Pierre de Coubertin’s vision and concept of Olympism and education he briefly described in his Olympic letter No, III in October 1918. According to Pierre de Coubertin, Olympism is a state of mind, not a system. Nevertheless he also described four major tasks of education in the context of the harmonious development of body and mind. Coubertin wrote: “...to distinguish ... only the body and the mind, ... is too simplistic, but rather the muscles, the understanding, the character, and the conscience. This corresponds to the four-fold duty of the educator” (Coubertin, 2000, 547). If the educator is to have a four-fold task as his duty to educate in the spirit of Olympism, then the pupils will have a four-fold subject area of Olympic learning, to learn about the physical, social, moral, and mental domains of modern Olympism in physical activities and sports competitions, at their school lessons and in the other settings of their daily life.

Today, fair play is one value with an important extension outside the sport sector into many areas of public life, business affairs, and the environment at large. Fair play is no more only an attitude for personal human interactions; it has become a value which leads to many personal-environmental relationships including the protection of exploitation of material resources and of our nature on a global level. Fair play has also been focused as a part of value education in the context of school curricula and particularly as value education in physical education and school sports. There exist also examples of fair play as a cross-curriculum subject how the spirit and the notion of fair play fit in different school subjects as one Olympic ideal and as a part of Olympic education programmes (cf. Naul & Holze, 2011). Thus, the following four strands of modern value education at school may be highlighted:

1. Mutual respect is demanded as an inter-personal behavioral pattern, as a matter of non-discrimination of gender, ethnic, religious and political differences among participants and their peoples with the benchmark of fair play for any personal interactions inside and outside the sports ground, as well as in any school education context and in any other life-setting of children and youth (in particular – general education and religious education).
2. Harmonious education of body, will and mind should grow as eurhythmics character building through physical activities and sports in accordance with their rules and in cross-curricular combination of PESS with the subjects of fine arts, poetry and music (Olympic education).
3. Sustainability of natural resources and protection of the environment at large has become a new topic in the range of value education, particularly in different school subjects of science education (e.g. biology, chemistry, geography) and in some new teaching subjects, such as policy studies, economy and ecology.
4. Health enhanced PESS with the promotion of a healthy lifestyle has become a major item in many new European PE curricula, as well as demanded and promoted by the IOC on the occasion of the implementation of the OVEP programme. However, a sound value education outside Olympic education efforts, but inside the general school curriculum, is insufficient in many EU countries and overdue. We have to make sure that fair play is not in the shadow of new Olympic ideals and is taken more seriously for the purposed of new physical education, including sports.