The Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic

Kellie Burns is a historical sociologist at the University of Sydney interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, health and schooling. Her research investigates the socio-historical role of schools as public health spaces across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, examining how ideas about childhood disease and health were constructed. She is also engaged in various projects about vaccination literacy and school-based vaccination clinics, historically and contemporaneously. Helen Proctor is a professor of education at the University of Sydney, who uses historical methods and perspectives to examine the making of contemporary educational systems. She is interested in the history of how schools have shaped social and cultural life beyond the school gate, and how a range of relationships between schools, families and ‘communities’ have formed and changed from the late 19th to the early 21st centuries.

Introduction: Bodies, health and schooling

Kellie Burns and Helen Proctor

Part 1: Clinical practices

1. Raising a healthy nation: Provisioning public health in English schools, c. 1875–1914

Jim Harris

2. Schooling and medical assistance: The school clinics in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha and Henrique Mendonça da Silva

3. The mediation of childhood health during the polio era in Australia

Kellie Burns, Helen Proctor, Ilektra Spandagou and Heather Weaver

Part 2: Programmes and policies

4. Educating the underworked: Dudley Allen Sargent and the influence of the rural worker on American physical culture, 1875–1919

Jason L. Newton

5. Determining biological citizenship: Creating and effacing difference in Puerto Rico’s education

Bethsaida Nieves

6. Home economics as a school subject in Denmark: From disciplining girls in the kitchen to providing general knowledge about public health

Annette Rasmussen and Karen E. Andreasen

7. In the name of health and comprehensive education: Historicising contemporary school health in Chile

Felipe Hidalgo Kawada

Part 3: Architecture and spatialities

8. The classroom as healthy pavilion: Fresh air, natural light, and student bodies in 19th- and 20th-century American schools

Dale Allen Gyure

9. Escaping indoorness: Education and architecture in Italy’s summer camps during the Fascist era

Paolo Sanza

10. Architecture of health: Hygiene and schooling in Hong Kong, 1901–1941

Stella Meng Wang

11. Better Towns: Building healthy communities in New Zealand school texts

Frances Kelly

Part 4: Routines and disciplinary practices

12. Glimpses into the black box of schooling: Continuities and discontinuities in ‘gymnastics between the desks’, 1880s–1970s

Marta Brunelli

13. Who owns the body of the child? Human rights and corporal punishment in 1980s Australia

Helen Proctor, Kellie Burns and David Magro

14. Historical and contemporary perspectives on gendered school uniforms in Australia

Heather Weaver