Physical Education in American Schools

Early Practice

Before and after European settlement, Native Americans played lacrosse and many other games. European colonists' early schooling slighted physical development, despite the exercise recommendations in John Locke's important Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Scattered beginnings of the inclusion of physical education, for example, Benjamin Franklin's 1751 Philadelphia Academy, preceded independence.

Schools in the new nation gradually included exercise. Some boys' teachers instituted military drill, although Congress declined to require it after the War of 1812. German-style gymnastics won brief fame in schools during the 1820s. Round Hill School (1823–1834), an elite boys' academy in Northampton, Massachusetts, secured a German teacher and apparatus and added swimming, running, archery, and vigorous outdoor play to its curriculum. Other boys' schools in the 1820s to 1840s tried gymnastics, agricultural labor, and fencing.

Girls' educators, led by Catharine Beecher at the Hartford Female Seminary, developed “calisthenics” (from Greek words for “beauty” and “strength”), which incorporated slow ballet movements and wand exercises rather than masculine gymnastics. Mount Holyoke Seminary (1837) and others embraced calisthenics; more simply required girls to walk, weather permitting.

European Influences

Further innovations came from overseas. Among German immigrants after 1848 were thousands of gymnastics' enthusiasts or “turners.” Their athletic clubs (turnverein) at first appealed mostly to Germans—by 1860, the national Turnerbund had 10,000 members—but a turner normal school, founded in 1861, helped broaden the sport. Boarding schools [Page 586]rediscovered the athletically rich Round Hill model, starting with St. Paul's School in New Hampshire in 1856. Around then, Boston, Cincinnati, Hartford, and San Francisco required exercise in public schools.

The English games tradition gained institutional footing when the Young Men's Christian Association, founded in England in 1844, migrated to Boston and New York in 1851 and 1852, linking young men's physical and spiritual development. The Young Women's Christian Association started in Boston in 1866 with similar goals. Swedish gymnastics, a drill-based program using light apparatus like wands and climbing ropes, also arrived in the 1850s, winning Beecher's recommendation in an 1856 calisthenics Schoolbook. Meanwhile, Dioclesian Lewis developed his “American System” or “New Gymnastics.” He founded the Boston Normal Institute for Physical Training in 1861 and wrote several books; Boston schools soon adopted his program.

Now the “Battle of the Systems” was on, as school districts, cities, and states—California in 1866, and five others from 1892 to 1901—began mandating physical education in public schools. German gymnastics predominated for a time, using turner-trained teachers and heavy apparatus in high schools, colleges, and YMCAs (Young Men's Christian Associations). Swedish immigrant Baron Nils Posse founded the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics in 1889, which spread Swedish gymnastics to Boston's schools and beyond. Deweyan education, however, favored recreational, informal, individualized programs.

The Swedish and American systems fell out of esteem; German gymnastics survived as an individual sport. School-based programs, such as those developed from 1885 to 1902 by Luther Halsey Gulick, emphasized pleasant games and exercises, and his student, James Naismith, developed basketball toward this end. Gulick's influence helped plant school gymnasiums, playgrounds, and nonschool athletic leagues throughout the nation. Military drill briefly reappeared in curricula during World War I.

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