ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the evolution of the close interdependence between the curriculum and the organisation of the classroom's spaces and school desks (seen as gymnastic tools), an interdependence which, in Italy, resulted in the birth of ‘gymnastics between the desks’: an educational practice that remained in use over almost a century in the peninsula. From time to time approved or refused by policymakers, educational thinkers, physical educators and school hygienists, ‘gymnastics between the desks’ persisted for decades as the only organised physical activity practicable in the given structural and economic conditions (availability of modern schools and equipped gyms) and, with its authoritarian approach, somehow helped to keep alive a traditional pedagogical vision of the pupils’ body as an object of disciplining. By the 1970s, the practice had fallen out of favour following fierce criticisms levelled by reformers and representatives of active pedagogies, who tried to redesign a curriculum of the body based on a renewed and more libertarian vision of the relationship between school spaces, education and the child.
