The Construction of the Curriculum and the Profession of Physical Education in Argentinean Fin de Siècle XIX

Abstract

William Reid said that despite physical education programs are practically universal, almost none of them are central. However, formal education is founded on corporal education (cf. Goodson, I. y Ball, S., 1984). This thesis is evident in the Argentinean case. From its origins, physical education was established as a school discipline that, regardless the pedagogical priorities, took the complementary role of intellectual and moral education. Indeed, this article analyzes the beginning of the discipline, which occurred in the building process of its curriculum and in the configuration process of its profession. The objective is observing that the birth of the Argentinean educational system produced the physical education and by the institutionalization of this profession, the physical education is formed and reproduced. Analyzing what is known as the passage of the physical education syntagma -understandingthat these two terms form a third one, keeping in it the first meanings- to the physical education oxymoron-combination of the opposite, but not antinomian between them, that produces a neologism, forming a new symbolic universedifferent from the original-, this text reflects from the regulation of physical education with the pioneer Common Education Law in 1884, to the construction of the oxymoron as a result of the creation of the Escuela de Gimnasia y Esgrima (which belongs to Argentinean Army) in 1897, the issuing of the Decree of 1898 which declared physical education mandatory, and the definition of its name and profession since 1903.