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Play, Games and Cognitive Development: Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Physicians, Neurologists, Psychologists and Others Already Knew What Researchers Are Proclaiming Today

‘Exercise and Children’s Intelligence, Cognition, and Academic Achievement’, which appeared in the Educational Psychology Review in 2008, is only one of a growing number of recent studies that support the assertion that physical activity is important for cognitive development. Most people today are probably unaware that more than 100 years ago, numerous physicians, neurologists, psychologists and physical educators already knew this. In 1876 neurologist James J. Putman (who had studied in England with the noted neurologist John Hughlings Jackson) had advocated the initiation of public school physical education. At the same American Social Science Association meeting physician David F. Lincoln stated that both manual training (the more ‘applied’ form of motor activity) and gymnastics (the ‘more pure kinetic’ form) are essential parts of a child’s education. Many of their contemporaries expressed similar views. One of these was the noted turn-of-the century psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who wrote often about the importance of play, games and educationally oriented sports for both physical health and neurological development. Others understood the importance of creating the school-based and community programmes that were needed to make what researchers were finding – and asserting – a reality. Physical education was increasingly made part of the curriculum. By 1904 most of the more than 100 ‘settlement houses’ in the USA included recreational and sports programmes for children, youth and often adults. Following its founding in 1906, the Playground Association of America became a major force in extending such work. By the 1920s, the needed programmes had grown extensively. As Michael O’Shea (a professor at the University of Wisconsin) reasserted in his 1924 book The Child: His Nature and His Needs, well-designed programs are needed to put “words” (the findings of research) into practice. Beginning in the 1970s these needed programs, which had existed in the USA for more than 50 years, began a sharp decline. By 2006, at the same time that many research articles were appearing that supported daily physical education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that only about 30% of boys and girls were attending such classes. Books such as educational psychologist Jane Healy’s Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What To Do About It (1990) already had cautioned readers about the negative effects of such things as scripted teaching, which would infect the curriculum following the enactment of the well-intended, but poorly conceived, ‘The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001’. Perhaps it is not surprising that recently a growing number of books, articles and Internet postings have been calling for the restitution of quality physical education and community recreational programs. This article investigates these and related matters.