After Boris Johnson called for the reinstatement of the two-hours-a-week school sports target (indeed, he suggested that children do two hours of sport a day), David Cameron has again taken to the airwaves to defend its abolition. This time, he complained that “a lot of schools were meeting that [the target] by doing things like Indian dance or whatever, that you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport, so there’s a danger of thinking all you need is money and a target.”
But this Daily Mail-style argument from anecdote (does Cameron actually know of any schools that teach Indian dance? And what if they did? For the sport averse, dance is an excellent form of exercise) is unsupported by evidence. As Philip Collins notes in his typically excellent Times column (£):
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