ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the introduction of art and physical education as topics of instruction into the curriculum of mass schooling. In the West, the period 1860–1900 witnessed the origin and spread of ideologies justifying both art and physical education as proper subjects of instruction. Physical education became associated with national ‘fitness’ during this period in England and Germany. The chapter explains why the core subjects of instruction, art and physical education, diffused more slowly than others to educational systems outside the West. Similarly, ideologies justifying subjects that helped construct modern nations out of tribes, colonies and empires spread rapidly. Constructing nations and new types of men and women to inhabit them, called ‘citizens’, was a prominent component of modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the case of art and physical education, ideologies justifying inclusion in mass schooling rested largely on the ‘distinctiveness’—and superiority—of the Western tradition, and the link between this history and world economic hegemony.
