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Article Excerpt
From the 1920s through the early 1940s, school-based programs in both health and physical education--mandated by government legislation and hailed by the public--increased in scope and complexity. By 1937, the assumption of the interconnectedness of the two fields was institutionalized in the merger of the American Physical Education Association with the Department of School Health and Physical Education of the National Education Association to form the American Association for Health and Physical Education. This paper focuses on the role of health education, physical education, and public health professionals in the emergence and critique of scholastic health and physical education programs in the first half of the 20th century.
Key words: hygiene, public health, school health
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In 2000, the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion report, Promoting Better Health for Young People Through Physical Activity and Sports, stated what many Americans had already observed: "Our nation's young people are, in large measure, inactive, unfit, and increasingly overweight" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2000). The following year, a report of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), also a division of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), noted in its Healthy People 2000 Final Review that "most adults and many children are not (physically) active enough to achieve ... health benefits ..." (NCHS, 2001, p. 65). Indeed, the NCHS reported that the daily provision of physical education for school children had moved away from its year 2000 target (NCHS, 2001).
Reports of an "obesity epidemic," rising diabetes rates, as well as data documenting declining physical activity rates among children and youth are increasing in the national media (Perfectly Fat, 2005). Many state education offices are addressing youth inactivity through physical education legislation, although with limited success. In 2005, 43 states introduced measures to implement or improve school physical education or activity standards; 18 states adopted legislation, although two governors vetoed these actions (Health Policy Tracking, 2005).
While the CDC and other national health agencies increasingly promote the connection between health and physical education at the public school level in the U.S., many of these programs continue to be guided by distinct aims, separate national guidelines, and a national organization that connects the disciplines only at the highest administrative level, such as the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD). In California, for example, school teachers implement the Physical Education Model Content Standards for California Public Schools (California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 2004) and the Health Framework for California Public Schools, both projects of the California Department of Education (California State Board of Education, 2003). In states without a unique document prepared by a department of education, two national curricula are available for local school districts: National Association for Sport and Physical Education Standards and Guidelines (National Association for Sport and Physical Education, 2004) and those prepared by the American Association of Health Education (American Cancer Society, December 2005-April 2006). Currently, in many institutions of higher education, the preparation of teachers and other professionals in physical education or kinesiology and health education occurs in separate departments and with differentiated coursework, with few such notable exceptions as the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
The disciplinary divisions between health education and physical education in school programs and in the university training of practitioners had been an important topic of discussion among the professions' leaders and rank-and-file members in the first several decades of the 20th century. The 1937 merger of the American Physical Education Association and the Department of School Health and Physical Education of the National Education Association (NEA), to form the American Association for Health and Physical Education (AAHPE) as a department of the NEA, was an important outcome of the dialogue presented in professional publications and professional meetings. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of professionals in health education, physical education, and public health in the programs dedicated to the health of public school children in the period between 1920 and 1950.
A variety of health messages about disease prevention, growth, physical activity, and nutrition appeared and were advocated in early publications of the Child Health Organization (CHO), established in 1918 by physicians
in the New York Academy of Medicine. Renamed the American Child Health Association (ACHA) in 1923 when it combined with the American Child Hygiene Association, the CHO was originally founded as the New York-based Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1909, the first in the country (Van Ingen, 1935). In one CHO publication, the Pied Piper of Health, one of many health plays created by teachers and pupils in the New York City public schools during the early 1920s, the sixth "health rule" recited by young thespians reminded the audience that: "Exercise will make you strong, so to the gymnasium you must go, and watch your muscles harder grow, and long, happy walks on sunny street will make the warm blood through your veins creep" (CHO, 1921, p. 22). Publications such as this were part of a new and growing campaign by educators, physical educators, and medical professionals aimed at improving the health of American children in the second quarter of the 20th century.
Discussions of the healthful benefits of physical activity were typically found in medical periodicals, such as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, rather than the professional physical education literature throughout the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s (Park, 1990a). The founders of the Association for the Advancement of Physical Education in 1885, identified health and physical development as important goals of physical training programs and systems, and by the end of the 19th century physical education teacher-training institutions began to incorporate, in a rudimentary way, health-related courses into their curricula (Park, 1990a). These events provided some necessary stimuli for the eventual development of specialized teacher training programs in health instruction, often in conjunction with already established physical education courses, and the implementation of physical education and health education curricula in schools at all levels. By the early decades of the 20th century, several national health entities, including the American Medical Association, created auxiliary units, such as the 1921 Joint Committee on Health Problems in Education of the NEA and the American Medical Association, dedicated to the specific issues associated with school children's health (Means, 1962).
The 1920s to the 1940s were also critical decades in the history of American physical education, as a number of societal events contributed to the expansion and transformation of the field. Social pressure to improve physical education at all levels increased after one third of the conscripts failed to qualify for induction into the armed services in World War I (Hackensmith, 1966). Although a "wave of legislation" mandating physical education and hygiene had crossed the nation as early as 1916, by the end of World War I, 28 states required public school physical education. Many of these laws included the assumption that health instruction would be part of the curriculum (Hackensmith, 1966).
New approaches to the field of physical education also characterized the 1920s and 1930s. The ranking of "health" first on the list of seven "Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education" published in a U.S. Bureau of Education pamphlet in 1918 provided impetus to those advocating broader educational motives for physical education (NEA, 1918). In their book, The New Physical Education, Wood and Cassidy (1927) advocated "natural gymnastics," replacing old forms of structured gymnastics with outdoor activities, games, and natural play to offer circumstances "for full development of intelligence along with the physical growth" (p. 47).
Some of the new ideas in physical education focused on educational and social motives rather than health. The work of Jesse Williams emphasized preparing the child for citizenship, a stance that occupied physical education, including sport programs, from the 1930s through the 1960s (Gerber, 1971). Williams emphasized the need for physical education to "aim higher than health" and incorporate "the loftier virtues of courage, endurance, and strength ... and through it all the spirit of splendid living--honest, worthy, competent" (Williams & Brownell, 1946, p. 26).
Through the 1920s, school health instruction also became more widespread yet content varied, and many programs simply included rudimentary instruction in developing personal health habits (Means, 1962). Although health-oriented "hygiene" programs had been in place across the educational system since the mid-19th century, new views of health in relation to physical education, particularly as they connected these programs to the broader educational aims of social efficiency and citizenship, informed the directions of the two fields as they developed into the 1930s.
School-based health instruction also emerged as an outgrowth of the late 19th-century interest in "the public's health" that led to organizations such as the American Public Health Association in 1872 and the National Board of Health in 1879. As a result, early school-based health instruction typically addressed issues associated with developing personal health habits and bodily functions and focused less attention on the healthful benefits of physical activity.
Early Efforts in "Health" Education
The antebellum antecedents of health education and instructional preparation were few in number and limited in scope. Some institutions of higher learning began to offer lectures on hygiene as early as those offered by Harvard in 1818 (Means, 1962). By 1839, the Lexington Normal School (MA) offered a course in "preventive medicine" for educators (Viles, 1887). During the next few years, Massachusetts School Board Reports included persuasive arguments by Horace Mann, the first secretary of the nation's first Board of Education, about the educational value of and need for instruction in physiology and hygiene:
The study of Human Physiology, however--by which I mean both the Laws of Life, and Hygiene or the rules and observances by which health can be preserved and promoted--has claims so superior to every other ... that I shall ask the indulgence of the Board, while I attempt to vindicate its title to the first...
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