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IHPRA Newsletter
December 2003

OUR LIBERTIES WE PRIZE
AND OUR RIGHTS WE WILL MAINTAIN

This month we invite all Iowans to study our State Seal and reflect on the responsibilities it implies. In particular, we ask you to consider the importance of physical readiness and the great harm we are doing to far too many of our children by allowing them to grow malformed, inert, and clumsy.

Davenport Iowa's 1911 elementary physical education guidelines

In the early 1900's, the word gymnastics was used to describe much of what now falls under the term physical training. The "Battle of the Systems" signaled a shift away from physical training to an unreasonable dependence upon sports and games, so much of what is being rediscovered today concerning physical fitness innovation looks new. The brilliant physical educator Mabel Lee wrote in her 1949 classic Body Mechanics and Conditioning that:
No educator need apologize for including gymnastics in his program even though the too ardent advocates of education through sports alone view with a scornful eye any one who has the temerity to speak in defense of gymnastics as one of the necessary tools in a physical educators kit.