A guide to the history of physical education

Man’s earliest endeavor to perfect the body, discipline the mind, and mold the character of the young by means of selected forms of physical activity and special regimen could d...

The year 400 B.C. may be taken as marking roughly the close of the two or three centuries which witnessed the gradual development and culmination of physical training in Greece....

The Germans as we meet them in the pages of Caesar and Tacitus[4] are a race of sturdy, blue-eyed giants, who dwell in a land of forest and swamp. Their straggling villages cons...

Paul B. Du Chaillu, “The Viking Age: The Early History, Manners, and Customs of the Ancestors of the English-speaking Nations, Illustrated from the Antiquities Discovered in Mou...

No sooner had the Teutonic tribes overrun Romanized Europe than they began to yield, in turn, to the proselyting activities of the young and lusty Christian Church. And with it...

In the cities of Northern Italy the dying out of the old Roman schools, as a result of internal decay and the inroads of the Teutonic barbarians, was not followed by the complet...

Chivalry, or the body of law and custom relating to knighthood, prevailed almost universally throughout western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Its usages w...

A succession of influences operating in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had widened the scope of human interests and produced a vague longing after knowledge which was not to...

The universities of the Middle Ages had made their contribution to the intellectual advancement of Europe, but they could not break the bands of ecclesiastical tyranny that stil...

the entire work, are concerned with physical training, which is treated under the following heads: “Of sundry forms of exercise necessary for a gentleman. Exercises whereof come...

The best of the Renaissance writers on education had begun to break away from authority and tradition, and with reason as a guide were groping their way toward a training better...

“... Plato, in his _Republic_, enjoins the same exercises on women as upon men, and in this I think he was right.... Since the body is born, so to speak, before the soul, the fi...

_Johann Bernhard Basedow_ (1723-1790), the son of a Hamburg wigmaker, attended school in his native city and was for several years a student of theology in Leipsic, later accept...

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the father of popular gymnastics (_Volks-_ or _Vereinsturnen_) in Germany, was born August 11, 1778, at Lanz, a Prussian hamlet lying midway between Hambu...

By the Prussian cabinet order of June 6, 1842, already referred to (page 101), physical training was “formally recognized as a necessary and indispensable part of male education...

The astonishing development of popular interest in gymnastics which has taken place in Germany and other European countries can be traced directly to Jahn’s work at the Hasenhei...

The beginnings of the playground movement in Germany can be traced back to a time when the Franco-Prussian war was a very recent memory, and its pioneers were men moved by the s...

For more than a century gymnastics in Sweden has been undergoing development along three more or less distinct lines, educational, military, and medical, _i.e._, as an integral...

Immediately after Ling’s death, and in accordance with his wishes, _Branting_ was appointed Director in his stead, and retained the position for twenty-three years (1839-1862)....

In Sweden, as in Germany,[135] there are two types of public schools, the elementary, common, or _folkskola_ (people’s school), and the secondary, or _allmänna läroverk_, corres...

Denmark was the first European state to introduce physical training into its schools as an essential part of the course, and to prepare teachers of that subject by offering syst...

While the _Turnverein_, or popular gymnastic society, was spreading over Germany, and systems of school gymnastics were being developed in that country and in Sweden, a variety...

(Oxford, 1864). He also compiled “A System of Fencing, for the Use of Instructors in the Army” (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1864). A general order of July 31, 1864, states...

The types or systems of physical training found in Europe can all be reduced to three elemental forms, illustrated by the _Turnverein_ or popular gymnastic society of Germany, t...

The different systems or sorts of physical training which were brought forward for trial and the agencies which promoted its spread in the United States during the nineteenth ce...

In the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century four different systems of physical training had been brought forward for trial in the United States—the drill and disci...

Each of the four systems or sorts of physical training brought forward for trial during the decade whose middle point was 1830 had been adopted by one or more institutions of co...

The first introduction of the Jahn gymnastics into the United States, in the years 1825-1828, we owe to Follen, Beck, Lieber, and Völker, men who had been associated with the Ge...

In 1869, eighteen years after the introduction of the Young Men’s Christian Association into America, the first Association buildings to contain gymnasia were dedicated, in San...

The system of medical gymnastics which we owe to the labors of Per Henrik Ling and his successors at the Royal Normal School of Gymnastics (the “Central Institute of Gymnastics”...

The playground movement, which we have already traced in Germany (pp. 132-145) and Denmark (pp. 194-197), was slow in gathering headway in the United States. Minister von Gossle...

The earliest attempt in America to prepare teachers of physical education was made by Dio Lewis in the years 1861-1868, at his Normal Institute for Physical Education in Boston...