The History of Physical Education in Spanish Schools. A transversal bibliographical review to foster a social and critical history of physical education

Abstract

This article presents a review of 226 studies that shed light on the history of physical education in Spanish schools from 1881 to the present day. Following documentary analysis of these studies, we call for proposals concerning new theoretical and methodological approaches to add to a social and critical history of physical education. The methodology applied introduces a literature review of localised studies (doctoral theses, book with IBSN, articles in academic journals and conference papers) in Spanish sources of academic documentation (Dialnet, Google Académico, Recoleta, Teseo, etc.), followed by an analysis of their content, with the corresponding document indexing. The work is divided into two parts: in the first we approach the fields of study related to physical education in schools, and in the second we undertake a critical evaluation of the studies presented, from 1881 to 2015, in order of the main nature of their content.

The results reveal the state of the history of physical education in Spanish schools. The meagre interest raised by studies into physical education in Spain inveighs against this area of research, which, nevertheless, still harbours an aspiration to re-contextualise knowledge in its own field. To this end we propose new lines of research, point out the advantages and disadvantages of steering history towards a different social and critical paradigm, and discuss the issues that this raises.