Glimpses into the black box of schooling. Continuities and discontinuities in “gymnastics between the desks”. The 1880s-1970s

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). This interdependence that, in Italy led to the birth of the gymnastics between the desks, an educational practice that remained in use on the peninsula for almost a century. Approved or rejected from time to time by politicians, educational thinkers, physical educators, and school hygienists, gymnastics between the desks remained for decades the only organised physical activity practicable in the given structural and economic conditions (scarce availability of modern schools and equipped gyms). Again, this authoritarian approach helped to keep alive a traditional pedagogical vision of the student's body as an object to be disciplined, but also as a secondary interest for the teacher. It was not until the early 1970s that this practice fell out of favour, following fierce criticism from reformers and proponents of active pedagogy who sought 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.