La scuola elementare e l'educazione fisica nell'Italia liberale (1888-1923)

[Autom. eng. transl.] The book reconstructs the developments of physical education in the Italian elementary school between the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century. The research presented is innovative both for its theme, which has never been investigated so far in the specialized and popular literature, and for its heuristic approach, which takes an internal point of view on institutional events and the educational-didactic dynamics of the first level of education. . Supporting the most recent requests of national and international scholastic historiography, the volume illustrates the ministerial prescriptions with which the teaching of motor activities in primary institutes of our country was officially regulated and, in parallel, tries to document how the same prescriptions were implemented from their actual curriculum. In the context of a phase of our national history marked by alternating orientations of school politics (now marked by conservatism, now by reformism) and by the comparison between different currents of pedagogical thought (positivism, herbartism and idealism), information and the reflections on the type of motor exercises proposed and practiced, on the spaces in which to carry them out and on the role assigned to the teacher in the didactic scene shed light on a discipline which, dealing with the body, conveyed formative meanings destined to affect the more general teaching processes / learning and above all on the definition of the relationship between the authority of the teacher and the free initiative of the pupil.