This book explores the social construction of children's bodies in Australian and British schools between 1870 and 1950, focusing on practices within physical training, medical inspection, and sport. The key argument is that there was a process of constructing the body in accordance with that phase of modernity Foucault calls 'disciplinary society'. The docile body produced was pliable, yet economically productive, a body that could, through close scrutiny and careful measurement, be regulated to ensure the healthy propagation of the race and a ready supply of economically productive citizens. Until 1915, a matrix of precise, meticulous and ponderous discursive practices to achieve this end was employed in Australian and British schools. The inter-war years saw a process of reconstruction, and by 1945, more liberalized forms of physical education had been introduced, which form the basis of contemporary practices that are only in the 1990s beginning to be challenged.
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