Giuseppe Lombardo Radice and physical education in elementary schools

This essay examines Giuseppe Lombardo Radice’s contribution to the debate and school regulations regarding Physical Education in Italian elementary schools in the period in which he elaborated his reflections on the teaching of this discipline, that is, from 1913, when his "Lezioni di didattica e ricordi di esperienza magistrale" ["Lessons in Didactics and Memoirs of Teaching Life"] was published, to 1923, the year in which he wrote the programmes for elementary education in the context of the Gentile school reform. The text documents how Lombardo Radice’s proposal for physical activities in the elementary curriculum asserted the educability of the body through an alternative pedagogical theory to positivism, expressed an original reinterpretation of the didactic orientation relating to play that had arisen in the late 19th century, and was in tune with a democratic conception of national education.