Foundations of Physical Education I: Physical and Adapted Physical Education, the Philosophies of Education Applied to Physical Education, the Development of Physical Education in Greece, Rome, Sweden, Russia, England, Denmark, Germany, the USA, Australia and China, its Growth in India, and Recreation and Wellness

Each major philosophy answers the questions of what is real, what is worth knowing and what is good, and each answer has consequences for the aims, curriculum, methods and role of the teacher in physical education. No school of physical education follows one philosophy purely; most modern programmes are eclectic, but the examiner expects each philosophy to be matched with its characteristic emphasis.

Ancient Greece gave physical education its first theory. In Sparta the state took boys from their families at about seven into the agoge, a harsh military upbringing whose aim was the warrior; girls too exercised, to bear strong children. Athens aimed instead at the harmonious development of body and mind: boys learned wrestling, running, jumping and throwing at the palaestra (a wrestling school) and later exercised at the gymnasium, and music and letters stood beside gymnastics. The pentathlon, the ideal of kalokagathia (the beautiful and the good) and the great festival games came from this culture. Rome was utilitarian: physical training served military service, citizens exercised on the Campus Martius, and the public baths and the gladiatorial and chariot spectacles of the Empire turned sport into entertainment rather than education.

Modern systems of gymnastics arose in northern Europe in the nineteenth century, often out of national feeling after the Napoleonic wars. In Germany Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, the "grandfather of German gymnastics", wrote Gymnastics for the Youth (1793); Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the "father of German gymnastics", opened the first Turnplatz (outdoor gymnasium) at the Hasenheide near Berlin in 1811, developed apparatus work such as the parallel bars and horizontal bar and founded the Turnverein movement; Adolf Spiess brought gymnastics into the school curriculum. In Denmark Franz Nachtegall opened a private gymnastics institute in 1799 and is credited with making Denmark among the first countries to introduce physical education into schools and to train teachers for it. In Sweden Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839) built a scientific, anatomically based system divided into educational, medical, military and aesthetic gymnastics and founded the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm in 1813; his medical gymnastics is an ancestor of physiotherapy.

England took a different road: its tradition was games rather than gymnastics. The public schools, above all Rugby under Thomas Arnold, made organised team games a means of building character, the ideal of "muscular Christianity", and codified many modern sports, while Archibald Maclaren designed a system of physical training for the army and opened a gymnasium at Oxford. In Russia Pyotr Lesgaft laid the scientific foundations of physical education in the late nineteenth century, and the Soviet state later built mass fitness around the GTO programme, "Ready for Labour and Defence", introduced in 1931, with specialised sports schools and institutes of physical culture. In the United States Edward Hitchcock became professor of physical education and hygiene at Amherst College in 1861, Dudley Sargent led the Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard and pioneered anthropometric testing, the association that is now SHAPE America was founded in 1885, and the "new physical education" of Thomas Wood, Clark Hetherington and Rosalind Cassidy moved the subject from formal gymnastics to games and education through the physical; basketball (1891) and volleyball (1895) were invented at YMCA settings.

Australia's physical education grew from British drill and games traditions into a national sporting culture; after a poor result at the 1976 Olympics the government opened the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in 1981, a model of state-supported elite sport widely copied since. China's tradition is ancient: cuju, a kicking game, is recorded from the Warring States and Han periods, and the physician Hua Tuo devised the Wu Qin Xi, the "Five Animal Frolics", as health exercise; martial arts (wushu) and taijiquan belong to the same heritage. The People's Republic built physical education on mass participation, broadcast radio calisthenics and specialised sports schools that feed a state elite system, and adopted a National Fitness Programme in 1995.

In ancient India physical culture was part of the education of the warrior and the householder: the Vedic and epic literature describes archery (dhanurvidya), wrestling (mallayuddha), chariot racing, swimming and hunting, and the gurukula combined physical discipline with learning. Yoga, systematised in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, joined physical postures, breath control and meditation into one discipline. In the medieval period wrestling in the akhara flourished under royal patronage, and polo (chaugan), hunting and horsemanship were courtly pursuits. Indigenous games such as kabaddi, kho-kho and mallakhamb come from this long tradition.

Under British rule drill and European games entered schools, and the YMCA brought organised physical education: Harry Crowe Buck founded the YMCA College of Physical Education in Madras (now Chennai) in 1920, the first institution in India to train physical education teachers professionally. After independence the state built a national structure. The Central Advisory Board of Physical Education and Recreation was set up in 1950 and prepared a National Plan of Physical Education and Recreation (1956); the Lakshmibai National College of Physical Education opened at Gwalior in 1957 and became a deemed university in 1995 as the Lakshmibai National Institute of Physical Education; the National Institute of Sports opened at Patiala in 1961 to train coaches; and the Sports Authority of India was established in 1984 after the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi. The National Sports Policy of 1984 was replaced by the policy of 2001. The policies, schemes and bodies of the present day, from Khelo India to the Fit India Movement, are the subject of Unit V and the next two chapters.

Recreation is any activity freely chosen and pursued in leisure time for the enjoyment and satisfaction it gives, and which renews ("re-creates") the person. Its characteristics are that it is voluntary, pleasurable, done in leisure, constructive and socially acceptable, and universal across ages; its principles, as the textbooks give them, include that every person needs recreation, that programmes should offer variety and choice for all ages, sexes and abilities, that they should be planned around local needs and resources, that activities should be safe, supervised by trained leaders and inexpensive enough to be open to all, and that the community should take part in planning them. Its importance lies in physical and mental health, stress relief, social integration, the constructive use of leisure and the prevention of delinquency.

Recreational programmes are indoor (board games, table tennis, reading, music, crafts, indoor games) or outdoor (picnics, hiking, trekking, camping, swimming, gardening, outdoor games), and are planned for particular groups: children (play, story plays, low-organised games), adolescents (sports, adventure, clubs), adults and industrial workers (sports clubs, hobbies, cultural activities that offset monotonous work), older people (walking, yoga, light games, social gatherings) and persons with disabilities (adapted games, wheelchair sports, special recreation). Modern trends include commercial recreation (gyms, theme parks, adventure tourism), digital and screen-based recreation and its sedentary risks, nature-based and adventure recreation, community fitness events such as marathons, wellness tourism, and the use of recreation as therapy.

Wellness is an active, lifelong process of making choices towards a healthy and fulfilling life; it is broader than health understood as the absence of disease. Halbert Dunn introduced the idea of "high-level wellness" in the late 1950s, and Bill Hettler's model for the National Wellness Institute (1976) set out six dimensions: physical, emotional, intellectual, social, spiritual and occupational; later models add environmental and financial wellness. Its benefits include lower risk of lifestyle disease, better mood and productivity and a longer healthy life; its challenges are sedentary work, screen time, poor diet, stress, tobacco and alcohol, and unequal access to facilities. Wellness is developed and maintained through regular physical activity, balanced nutrition, adequate sleep, stress management, avoiding harmful substances, social connection and periodic health check-ups, which is why the Fit India Movement launched on 29 August 2019 framed fitness as a daily habit rather than a sport.