As in many European countries, the creation of a Swiss democratic nation-state during the nineteenth century was based on the establishment of a national school system – free, compulsory and independent from the Churches – that could provide the ‘intellectual’ and ‘moral’ foundations for its citizens, also including some ‘physical’ foundations through physical education (then often referred to as ‘gymnastics’) becoming a mandatory and federal school discipline, and the only one in the Swiss system.
Thus, our ambition with this chapter is to study the several evolution’s phases of the concepts governing the construction of the school discipline ‘physical education’, from the preparation of soldiers at the end of the nineteenth century to the training of future champions in the middle of the twentieth century, especially when in 1964 the Swiss Olympic delegation came back from Innsbruck with no medals, starting a deep and long-lasting change in the way politics was governing the sport field, in the middle of a new approach for PE, centred on motricity and making always more space for the ‘sports’.
In fact, our aim is also to go beyond the idea that sports will gradually influence physical and sports education, as the adaptation and transition from the term gymnastics to that of physical (and sports) education shows. It is a singular object, which influences as much as it is influenced, and it is therefore necessary to go beyond the all too often retained hypothesis of physical education and sport being simply a mirror of the social and political dynamics of its time, considering schools as ‘national body factories’.