ABSTRACT
Sir Thomas Elyot's treatise, The Governour (1531), provides the first discussion to be written in English of the value and place of physical education. 1 Just over a hundred years later, during the disturbed conditions that followed the outbreak of the English Civil War, John Milton took up the theme of physical prowess in his pamphlet, On Education (1644). Neither writer was concerned with the education of the mass of the people. Elyot's readership was drawn mainly from the new Tudor aristocracy. Milton had designed an education for the privileged few who commanded sufficient leisure and social standing to speak in the councils of the nation in peacetime and to ‘come out of a long war … perfect commander [s] in the service of their country.’ 2 Similarly Herbert Spencer, two centuries later, had mainly the problems of middle-class education in mind when he published Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical in 1861. The genteel ladies’ academies that he condemned because they forbade any form of vigorous physical activity were far removed, both socially and economically, from the public elementary schools attended by their less fortunate sisters.
