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8 - “Shaped Up” by the State: Government Attempts to Improve Children's Diets, Exercise Regimes, and Physical Fitness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2009

Judith Sealander
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

When the Indiana State Conference of Charities and Correction held its thirtieth meeting in Muncie in October of 1921, all area schoolteachers received a Monday afternoon off, to enable attendance at roundtables on “planning exercise assignments,” “playground planning,” and “proper feeding for children's weight gain.” The state's governor, the superintendent of public instruction for Indiana, social workers, volunteers from juvenile court committees, representatives of anticruelty societies, members of mothers' pension selection committees, politicians, and several hundred teachers crowded into Muncie's largest auditorium.

In 1900, the idea that they needed a paid play supervisor would have astonished the counterparts of most of the state and local officials gathered in Muncie. The thought that it was a public duty to supervise the nutrition of children would not have occurred to them. Scales in classroooms so that “malnourished” children could be weighed on a weekly basis? Tax-supported playgrounds? Amazing.

Nonetheless, another expansion of state responsibility took firm root in the twentieth century. The United States embraced the physical training and proper nutrition of its young as public policy. Periodically, informed that its progeny were unable to defend the country against the Hun, or the Nazis, or the worldwide Communist threat, the nation went into a collective tailspin, and politicians appropriated more money for nutrition education, supplementary feeding programs, and mandatory physical training and testing.

The billions in tax dollars spent to promote nutrition, exercise, and “the science of play” did not pay many dividends.

Type
Chapter
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The Failed Century of the Child
Governing America's Young in the Twentieth Century
, pp. 293 - 322
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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