Physical Education to Prevent Physical Deterioration

Initially, concerns about public health in schools (infectious disease notification notwithstanding) emphasized promoting an environment conducive to education. Preventing disease and ensuring the child was sufficiently nourished prepared the child for classroom learning, but the classroom environment also had to be conducive to learning rather than a potential cause of pain, suffering, or ill-health. One 1888 editorial in the British Medical Journal warned that improperly ventilated classrooms could have serious health consequences. All too often, the editorial warned, the “baneful effects of foul air are very obvious in some schools, where we have seen groups of children presenting the signs of exhaustion from this cause – the pale faces, dull eyes, and restless movements indicating only too plainly the distress caused by want of free supply of oxygen, and accounting for the inattention complained of by the teachers.”1“Ventilation of Board Schools,” 1287. Another contemporary feared that poor illumination in classrooms negatively affected both the capacity of students to learn as well as their physiological wellbeing. They warned that classrooms had to be well lit to prevent the surging cases of myopia resulting from “the close and continuous use of the eyesight . . . in educational pursuits.”2“Myopia in Schools,” 568. Yet, much like air quality, this was within the power of public health to address. Children could be protected from the deleterious hazards of school life, the editorialist believed, if typefaces were large and legible, and students were taught how to position themselves best while studying: the ideal reading position required the student to sit with “the shoulders and pelvis . . . parallel with the edge of the desk, and the head upright or bent but slightly forward.” The editorialist added that desks and seats should be constructed to improve posture: desks should overhang the seat by two inches so that the student would sit upright; the desk itself should slope slightly to minimize the “bending forward of the head.”3“The Prevention of Myopia in School Children,” 126.

So, the classroom could be a danger to the child’s health if improperly managed, but it could also serve as a place to teach children good physical habits with lifelong benefits. Two decades after these early editorials, amid the growing concerns about “physical deterioration,” perhaps the greatest concerns about school environments warned that the effects of long hours of study with no physical activity “produced no good result.”4“Physical Degeneration in Sheffield: Why We Are Deteriorating.” School medical experts were certainly receptive to this idea. They saw an opportunity to use schools’ medical services to ensure that children’s physical development was healthy during their time in school. Mackenzie and Matthew wrote in their textbook that “it is not enough that a child should appear fit; it is essential that he shall be known to be so.” This required training the muscles, the heart, and the lungs, all of which could be monitored by regular endurance testing.5Mackenzie and Matthew, The Medical Inspection of School Children, 22. James Kerr agreed. He believed that regular exercise as part of the school day was beneficial to both “the general health” of the child and the development of their brain.6Kerr, Newsholme’s School Hygiene, 177–79.

It is thus worth paying attention to the emergence of a physical education curriculum in schools as another effort to combat the effects of the urban penalty on children. By the first decade of the twentieth century, schools were not only feeding children suffering from chronic malnourishment but teaching children healthy habits early in life. Physical education, contemporaries believed, would not only improve children’s physique from an early age but set them on a path towards a healthier adulthood. In turn, this would, in theory, make them better fit for the possibility of military service.

The origins of physical education in schools are similar to the origins of health visiting. It began with private charity and philanthropists making a case for a regular curriculum of physical education, especially in poorer districts of cities, decades before 1904. Over time, however, the responsibility to provide physical education gradually shifted onto the state. Beginning in the early 1880s, Reginald Brabazon, the twelfth Earl of Meath, insisted that public (municipal) funds should be provided to maintain green space, playgrounds, and gymnasia for the purpose of physical education.7Thorsheim, “Green Space in London,” 119. He believed this would “bring up a generation of English men and women, physically capable of bearing the burden of the high civilisation and extended empire they have inherited from their forefathers.”8Brabazon, Social Arrows, 77. While Lord Meath broached the subject in the language of imperial responsibility, Meath’s biographer, Alan Penn, suggests that his sentiment was “coupled with a genuine concern for the welfare of the lower classes” (Penn, Targeting Schools, 70). Yet, when Meath introduced a reform to the Elementary School Code in the House of Lords in May 1889 to require some form of physical education in schools, his proposal was met with resistance. Many of the Lords feared that the new curriculum would create unnecessary financial difficulties for schools. Still the amendment was eventually adopted one year later.9Penn, Targeting Schools, 70–71. In turn, Meath presented a second, more expansive Physical Education in Elementary Schools Bill to the Lords in 1890. In this second Bill, he proposed that “every elementary school in any populous town [exceeding 15,000] shall make fit and proper provision . . . for the instruction and practice of all scholars of both sexes in physical education,” lest the school lose its eligibility for public funding. This Bill failed twice, in 1890 and 1891, before finally passing in 1895.10Penn, Targeting Schools, 72–73.

When physical education was finally added to the English primary school curriculum in 1895, the curriculum typically took the form of exercises that combined gymnastics and dance to provide a “contrast to static classroom activities.” In some schools, physical education also incorporated military-style drills. Students performed simple rank-and-file formations and advanced to more complicated, but still rhythmic, maneuvers “such as scrolls, figures of eight, circles, squares and double circles.”11Bloomfield, “Drill and Dance as Symbols of Imperialism,” 82. The “Swedish Drill System” was the most commonly used system for teaching physical education in this manner. On command, students would perform a series of stretches carefully designed to improve a particular aspect of their bodily fitness. Each exercise affected a particular part of the body or muscle group (legs, neck, arms, spine, lateral, abdominal, or dorsal) or provided a particular type of exercise (balance, marching and running, jumping, or breathing).12Lewis, Swedish Drill Illustrated, 2. Most doctors generally agreed that the Swedish Drill System or another method of drill was an effective form of physical education, especially after the Second Anglo-Boer War. One essayist in the British Medical Journal offered a detailed commentary on how to offer a course of physical education:

W.P. Herringham, a physician and lecturer at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, went further in proclaiming the dual benefits of physical education for both the purposes of “public health and as a preparation for the citizen army of the future.”14Herringham, “On the Physical Training in Schools,” 1. He believed that drill, if taught properly and performed daily using the Swedish Drill System, helped children “develop their bodies” through specialized breathing exercises, movement exercises, marching, and turning in formation. Herringham believed that games and sport were also important for physical education and provided children with valuable “natural exercise . . . in the open air” and thus had a “very good effect upon the body.” Games developed the legs and drill helped foster healthy development of the arms, chest, and trunk.15Herringham, “On the Physical Training in Schools,” 2, 4.

But a problem remained as to how to formally embed the Swedish Drill System (or some other form of physical education) into school curriculums at the turn of the twentieth century. The aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War and the Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration made a clear case for the importance of expanding physical education as part of the school curriculum.16Penn, Targeting Schools, 81. But, until 1904, much of the actual work of teaching physical education was still left to private charities, like the Lads’ Drill Association, which was founded by Meath in 1899. For physical education to serve its intended purpose of ensuring the healthy development of the British child, contemporaries felt that it had to be given a serious place in the weekly curriculum. By 1906, Birmingham schools offered one hour and forty minutes of physical education per week, which was the among the highest amount of time dedicated to physical education by schools in the country, but Herringham believed this limited amount of time was still “insufficient.”17Herringham, “On the Physical Training in Schools,” 5. In addition, physical education had to complement instruction in diet and cookery, because, as James Niven noted, exercise without a healthy diet would only be “injurious” to the child.18Niven, “Feeding in Relation to the Health of the Young,” 26.

As the popularity of military-style drills grew, not everyone believed they were in the best interests of the students. John Gorst, for example, was a skeptic. In his book on The Children of the Nation, Gorst acknowledged that no one doubted the importance “of breeding stout, well-developed youths as recruits for the Army,” but he expressed skepticism as to whether elementary school age was the right time to drill the English child for soldiering. His rationale was physiological: “they have weak bones, their muscles are not fully formed, and the only kind of drill which is known to military sergeants – very beneficial, no doubt, to a stout ploughboy, fresh from agricultural labour – is utterly unsuitable to the weak and growing frames of these little children.”19Gorst, The Children of the Nation, 203–4. By contrast, in his earlier 1901 presidential address to the Educational Science section of the British Association, Gorst suggested that much good would come from other forms of compulsory physical education in schools, especially in polluted industrial towns where the opportunity for healthy outdoor exercises was limited. Rather than military drills, Gorst argued that a series of exercises would go a long way to correcting faults such as “feeble muscular tone, stooping shoulders, sunken chests, drooping heads, and partially bent knees” common among English children.20“Physical Culture in Schools,” 824. According to Gorst, over-exertion and bad posture were just as problematic as poor nutrition or a lack of physical training. He believed that much good could come from state-sponsored physical education in schools, but that this benefit could be achieved only if physical training was a part of greater attention to the health of the school-age child. He summarized this point in The Children of the Nation: “so long as a large proportion of school children are underfed, underclothed, and in a miserable physical condition, any attempt to make them perform physical exercises is merely an additional act of cruelty.”21Gorst, The Children of the Nation, 202. Thus, Gorst believed a comprehensive system of public health in schools was necessary. Feeding and physical education had to be a part of a larger whole, and such a whole would finally coalesce in 1907 with the formation of a new, national School Medical Service.