Year 2004 is established as the European Year of Education through Sport. Many people believe that participation in sport is beneficial to the process of education, indeed. But it has been also suggested that participation in sport may be detrimental for personality of young people. In this paper we would like to survey sport through the prism of pros and cons brought about by it to the process of education and to put forward some suggestions on how to release educational values from sport.

According to J. Nicholls' achievement goal theory in an achievement context individuals adopt two major goal orientations, task and ego. It is suggested that being task or ego oriented is linked to moral functioning in sport, and that way to educational values which are attributed to it. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between goal orientations, task and ego, and attitudes toward moral norms in sport (fair play) among young sportsmen practicing team sports. Participants were 111 students, both sexes, of sports schools and classes in Katowice agglomeration. The main findings of this study is negative effect of ego orientation and positive effect of task orientation on attitudes toward some of the norms, especially "respect for rules". It seems that for educationalists who conduct sports lessons and training it is important to develop a task orientation in young people.