Physical Education Curriculum, History of

The history of physical education can be seen as an important dimension of the history of curriculum because it treats the story of responses to questions of what is worthwhile in the psychomo-tor realm. The psychomotor as such is not merely an alternative to the cognitive (intellectual), the affective (emotional), the social, and the spiritual domains of human functioning. Instead, psycho-motor realm is an integration of all five, with a foregrounding of the physical. This history can be traced in ways that invoke many issues such as the influence of European sport and Puritan religious values, the role of physical activity for women, the emergence and popularity of sport, dueling versions of the purposes of physical education, and more recently, racial, ethnic, and gender issues. ...