Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This silent black-and-white clip, introduced by the intertitle ‘The system provides training to ensure healthy minds in healthy bodies’, shows secondary school students, boys in the foreground and girls behind, playing in a large schoolyard. In response to a signal, the students ‘freeze’ before organising themselves into rows. Once in rows they perform synchronised callisthenic exercises. The footage is filmed from the vantage point of an elevated camera.

Educational value points

• The clip reveals the importance South Australian schools of the 1920s placed on synchronised callisthenic displays. Such displays were usually combined with marching exercises. Often involving the use of flags, they required hours of practice and were generally performed to music provided by the school band. When performed in school uniform in conjunction with mass marching, the callisthenics created an impression of military regimentation.

• The footage in this clip displays a high degree of professionalism in its filming. The camera is situated carefully to show the impressive number of participants but also to show details of the individual performers. The event is staged under lighting that displays the geometric patterns created by the synchronised movement of the group.

• The importance of the balanced development of mind and body, as expressed in the clip’s intertitle, is an idea with ancient origins and modern relevance. First expressed by Plato in his The Republic, it was explored by writers such as John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who wrote about the essential role of exercise in a child’s education. These writings influenced the later development of callisthenics and gymnastics programs.

• State-aided schools in England promoted the benefits of gymnastics and callisthenic displays, and they were adopted in Australian schools in the 19th century but as the 20th century progressed, games, sport and dance increasingly replaced formal callisthenics in the Australian curriculum. Progressive educationalists in the 1930s began to emphasise the importance of unstructured play and games in psychosocial as well as physical development.

• Callisthenics originated in ancient Greece and were based on the idea that the performance of systematic exercises, usually without the aid of apparatus, would develop the beauty of the human form. This is reflected in the name, which was formed from a combination of the Greek words 'kalos’, meaning beauty, and 'sthenos’, meaning strength.

• The title of the film from which the clip is taken, The Rising Generation, may reflect the desire for renewal in SA after the memory of the losses of the First World War, given that almost 10 per cent of Australia’s war dead came from SA. Many also died during the post-War influenza epidemic. The subsequent rapid population increase and good harvests contributed to a more positive view of the future.

This clip starts approximately 8 minutes into the documentary.

This silent black-and-white clip, introduced by the intertitle ‘The system provides training to ensure healthy minds in healthy bodies’, shows secondary school students, boys in the foreground and girls behind, playing in a large schoolyard. In response to a signal, the students ‘freeze’ before organising themselves into rows. Once in rows they perform synchronised callisthenic exercises. The footage pans back and forth the grounds and is filmed from the vantage point of an elevated camera.