As he sought to bring all sports together under the common umbrella of the Olympic Movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin railed against the trend toward increasing specialization in sport and education.  He was, of course, pushing for the integration of exercise and sport into all levels of education.  While he succeeded in ensuring a great deal of diversity in the sports on the Olympic program, it seems he did not appreciate or foresee the benefits that would come from continuing specialization in higher ed, particularly in the sciences and technology.  This quote is from “Olympic Letter III: Olympism and Education,” which the Baron sent to his colleagues in 1918, encouraging them to prepare to push for greater physical education in the school systems of their nations once World War I ended.

“(In the modern educational system), the educated man will end up looking like those primitive mosaics in which little pieces formed larger, crude and stiff pictures. What a decline in comparison to Greek education, which was so lucid, its outline so clear! Let us not try to hide the fact that Olympism is a reaction against these unfortunate tendencies. Olympism refuses to make physical education a purely physiological thing, and to make each type of sport an independent, separate exercise. It refuses to catalogue the knowledge of the mind, and to classify it into mutually isolated categories.”