Sport, Health and the Body in the History of Education

Mark Freeman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138826588
• eBook ISBN: 9781317576013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Historians in recent years have paid considerable attention to sport and leisure in the past, and historians of education are no exception. The chapters in this book showcase the breadth and depth of scholarship in this area, bringing new perspectives to bear on the history of physical education in several different European countries. Ranging from schoolgirl cricket in early postwar England to the varying approaches to physical education in the nineteenth-century Netherlands, the contributions all emphasise the importance of physical education to wider conceptions of education for citizenship. A number of chapters tackle issues in gender history, while others focus on the effects – often unintended – of policy-makers and the conflicts that could arise from the imposition of new physical education curricula. Covering England, Scotland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece, this book features the work of both established and emerging scholars, and is an important contribution to the historiography of both education and sport.

This book was originally published as a special issue of History of Education.

INTRODUCTION
Sport, health and the body in the history of education

Most of the articles in this special issue of History of Education were originally presented at the History of Education Society annual conference, held at Glasgow University Union in November 2011. This conference attracted delegates from more than 10 countries, and the subject matter of the papers ranged even more widely. It was the first time that the Society’s conference had been held in Scotland, and the occasion was used to launch a new research network, Historians of Education in Scotland (HEdScot), funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The theme of the conference was ‘Sport, Health and the Body in the History of Education’. The history of sport and leisure is a flourishing area of historical research, with a number of journals dedicated to it, including Sport in History and the International Journal of the History of Sport. The latter, remarkably, is published 18 times a year. Historians of education have participated fully in the growth of interest in sport in recent years. A burgeoning historiography of physical education (PE) in many cultures and contexts, and broadly defined, has brought new breadth to the history of education. In this journal, articles on physical education in interwar Scotland, school playgrounds in Sweden in the 1970s, outdoor education in post-war Britain and gymnastics in nineteenth-century Hungarian schools give an idea of the range of interests that have been represented under this broad heading.¹ Nevertheless, Gary McCulloch’s recent survey of 40 years of articles on secondary education in this journal shows that physical education and the school curriculum has not featured significantly, although there has been a longstanding interest in ‘muscular Christianity’ and the athleticism of the late Victorian public school.²

It is appropriate, then, that a particular focus of the articles collected in this issue is on physical education, sport and gymnastics in schools in various European countries – France, Germany, Greece, Scotland, England and the Netherlands – since the nineteenth century. As John Welshman emphasised in an important article published in 1998 and dealing with England and Wales in the period 1900–1940, ‘physical education and sport had an enhanced significance since they overlapped with wider concerns and issues’, notably an interest in ‘education for citizenship’ that was a key feature of this period.³ The same holds true, as the articles in this issue show, across other periods and in other geographical contexts. The culture and curriculum of PE bears the influences of wider discourses and political priorities, and has often – as the cases of Greece and France, discussed in these pages, clearly demonstrate – been seen to serve a particular national interest. Although PE is by no means unique among school subjects in this respect, the ways in which cultural and political influences have affected its development are of particular interest, offering as they do insights into other areas of historical inquiry, notably histories of health, medicine and the body.⁴

The articles by Vincent Stolk et al. and Thierry Terret and Jean Saint-Martin both consider the intellectual influences on PE in specific European contexts. Stolk et al. consider nineteenth-century Dutch freethinkers and their approach to PE, and their article shows how the main objectives of this school of thought were to promote ‘humanity and individual development’ rather than ‘the main interests of the state’. This strand of Dutch thought, drawing heavily on the German concept of Bildung, focused on the promotion of ‘natural education’, in contrast to a parallel tradition that emphasised the social usefulness of PE and its role in the creation of good citizens. Terret and Saint-Martin examine the ‘French method’ and its role in supporting French cultural imperialism: the ‘method’ was successfully exported to Brazil, for example. The international dimension of PE cultures is an important aspect of educational history. As Welshman has noted, concerns about the faster development of PE in the continental dictatorships were a significant motivation among British policy-makers in the 1930s, when attempts were made to preserve Britain’s status as one of the ‘leading nations’ by enhancing the PE curriculum. Importantly, though, some aspects of the German and Russian systems did not find favour, being, in the words of a British government White Paper in 1936, ‘wholly alien to the national temper and tradition’.⁵ This emphasises the importance of specific national cultures in the history of education: although international influences have been widely felt, the national context has been at least as important in the ways in which PE has evolved. This is emphasised in the article in this issue by Dimitris Foteinos on the history of the modern Greek PE curriculum, which has served the political and ideological aims of the modern state, through a particular set of practices that have been considered to reflect the traditions of the ancient Greek world. According to Foteinos, in both dictatorial and liberal democratic regimes in modern Greece, PE curricula have incorporated practices that aim at the cultural ‘indoctrination’ of young people. These have taken various forms, including traditional Greek dancing, military-style drill and education in particular Olympic sports; in the most recent period they have aimed at promoting multiculturalism and global citizenship. Foteinos argues that it is these practices that have enabled PE to find a more secure and respected place within the curriculum, although at the same time other key objectives, notably the promotion of healthy lifestyles, seem to have been undermined.

These themes recur in Heather Dichter’s article on the ‘rebuilding’ of PE in the Western-occupied zones of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Here, the occupation powers found themselves dealing with the complex legacy of Nazi education, among which was a focus on ‘militarised sport’ in the PE curriculum. The creation of the Deutsche Sportshochschule to educate PE teachers was a vital part of the denazification programme, and it became a lasting legacy of the occupation. Its aim was to embed a more democratic version of PE into West German culture, and it seems to have had considerable early success. The occupation powers, particularly the Americans and British, believed that sport had an important role to play in fostering democracy in post-war Germany, and this echoes experiences in other countries, where the cultural impact of PE has been an important part of policy-makers’ thinking.

Although most of the articles in this issue focus on the motivations of those who developed the PE and sport curriculum, Eilidh H.R. Macrae’s article on the education of Scottish girls, considering mainly the post-war period, uses oral evidence to assess the pupils’ perspectives on the impact of educational policy. Macrae strikingly reveals the ‘minimal’ facilities available in terms of changing facilities, and the widespread ignorance of their own bodies that prevailed among many young women in Scotland at this time. Some of her findings echo those of an article by Angela Davis, published in History of Education in 2008.⁶

Using different sources, Rafaelle Nicholson shows that the perception of schoolgirls among educational officials in England was at odds with the experience of girls themselves: a demand for cricket existed among many girls and young women, which was not satisfied, ‘due to the entrenched conservative attitudes of the educational authorities and some teachers’. In both England and Scotland there was a marked reluctance to invest in facilities for girls’ sport, reflecting the persistence of powerfully gendered approaches to physical education.

The articles in this special issue focus on one area of ‘Sport, Health and the Body in the History of Education’; much more productive work has been, and remains to be, done under this broad theme. It is to be hoped that the publication of this collection of papers from the History of Education Society’s annual conference will present opportunities for further studies of PE in different cultural and political contexts, and that the history of sport and the body will remain an area of interest for historians of education.

Mark Freeman

University of Glasgow, UK

1. Fiona Skillen, ‘“A Sound System of Physical Training”: The Development of Girls’ Physical Education in Interwar Scotland’, History of Education 38 (2009): 403–18; Anna Larsson, ‘A Children’s Place? The School Playground Debate in Postwar Sweden’, History of Education (forthcoming); Mark Freeman, ‘From “Character-Training” to “Personal Growth”: The Early History of Outward Bound 1941–1965’, History of Education 40 (2011): 21–43; Miklos Hadas, ‘The Rationalisation of the Body: Physical Education in Hungary in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Education 38 (2009): 61–77.

2. Gary McCulloch, ‘The History of Secondary Education in History of Education’, History of Education 41 (2012): 25–39, esp. p. 35.

3. John Welshman, ‘Physical Culture and Sport in Schools in England and Wales 1900–40’, International Journal of the History of Sport 15 (1998): 60.

4. An earlier special issue of History of Education (36, no. 2, 2007) dealt with ‘The Body of the Schoolchild in the History of Education’.

5. Welshman, ‘Physical Culture’, 68–71.

6. Angela Davis, ‘“Oh no, Nothing, we didn’t Learn Anything”: Sex Education and the Preparation of Girls for Motherhood c.1930–1970’, History of Education 37 (2008): 661–77.

Journey in the historiography of the French Method of Physical Education: a matter of nationalism, imperialism and gender

Thierry Terret^a and Jean Saint-Martin^b

^aCentre for Research and Innovation in Sport (CRIS)University of Lyon 1 Lyon, France; ^bFaculty of Sport Sciences, University of Strasbourg, France

The three volumes of the French Method of Physical Education were published by the military school of Joinville-Le-Pont between 1925 and 1927 and became one of the most successful reference materials in France for sport and physical education among school, military and civilian institutions. Several authors studied these manuals, but they focused mainly on their pedagogic eclecticism and philosophical background. They also stressed that the Army accepted to reduce its military goal in order to fulfil the hygienic aims that the country considered crucial in the post-war context. Only recently, however, have new perspectives begun exploring more systematically the French Method in its social, political, gender and international aspects. The aim of this paper is to propose a first synthesis of these works and, together with some new insights, to free the French Method from the purely pedagogic history in which it has long remained within the historiography of education.

Introduction

At the end of 1918, with the war barely finish...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Sport, health and the body in the history of education
• 2. Journey in the historiography of the French Method of Physical Education: a matter of nationalism, imperialism and gender
• 3. Physical education for citizenship or humanity? Freethinkers and natural education in the Netherlands in the mid–nineteenth century
• 4. Exercise and education: facilities for the young female body in Scotland, 1930–1960
• 5. Who killed schoolgirl cricket? The Women’s Cricket Association and the death of an opportunity, 1945–1960
• 6. Rebuilding physical education in the Western occupation zones of Germany, 1945–1949
• 7. Images of the body: the Greek physical education curriculum since the Second World War
• Index