ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to the edited collection, The Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic: Histories of Public Health and Schooling. The chapter introduces the two main guiding concepts, ‘the curriculum of the body’—a term intended to encapsulate the multifarious educational technologies and discursive and material schooling practices that are enacted by schools on or through the body—and ‘the school as clinic’—the idea that schools can usefully be understood as ‘clinical’ spaces, in which health is addressed through teaching, through the management of bodies and spaces, and through public health interventions. The chapter then previews the collection's 14 international chapters, grouping them into four overlapping themes: (1) Clinical practices; (2) Programmes and policies; (3) Architecture and spatialities; and (4) Routines and disciplinary practices. The historical period in focus runs from the 19th to the 21st century, a time period when ‘going to school’ became the most common way of organising children's days and understanding their milestones.
