ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book represents the physical education (PE) in interwar Scotland, school playgrounds in Sweden in the 1970s, outdoor education in post-war Britain and gymnastics in nineteenth-century Hungarian schools. It shows that physical education and the school curriculum has not featured significantly, although there has been a longstanding interest in muscular Christianity and the athleticism of the late Victorian public school in Gary McCulloch's recent survey of 40 years of articles on secondary education. The book emphasises Dimitris Foteinos on the history of the Modern Greek PE curriculum, which has served the political and ideological aims of the modern state, through a particular set of practices that have been considered to reflect the traditions of the ancient Greek world. It focuses on the motivations of those who developed the PE and sport curriculum, Eilidh H. R. Macrae's article on the education of Scottish girls.
