Cartilla gimnástica infantil (1924): the first spanish official textbook for school physical education

Abstract

The Cartilla Gimnástica Infantil (Children's Gymnastic Booklet) is the first official Spanish physical education handbook for schools, earlier than the Cuestionarios mínimos para la Primera enseñanza (Minimum Questionnaires for First Education) of 1926, firsts in our contemporary educational History. Its style, concise and clear, shows its military authorship, which is also noted in the didactic guidelines, which emphasize the order and control of pupils. Nevertheless, it prescribes a quite acceptable plan of physical education, given the time and the origin of its doctrine: corporal games in profusion for infants and children, and exercises of educational gymnastics simple and very well explained for these last ones. It is noteworthy that the plan is also prescribed for girls, although with some adaptations that prefigure a future of these focused on motherhood. It is also to be noted its pioneering commitment to a "reduced" sport, in order to adapt it to school ages, to "imaginative" games, and to "pedagogical" games that are precursors of a didactic interdisciplinarity. The method used in this article for its study is intended to generate a current of analysis that favors the diachronic comparison of this type of documents, pointing to a history of the normative pedagogical thought of physical education, still to be done.