Years of 1920 [I]: History and Physical Education

The years following the implementation of the Republic (1910) will be troubled politically, economically and socially. On the one hand, because of World War I, but also, above all, by political instability, revolts (including military) and civil war.

On the one hand, the  discouragement , for another optimism and trust. To rebuild is necessary. But the effects of war in Portugal are tremendous and the country lives one of the most black periods of the century, with unsustainable instability.

Sport is seen as a mandatory activity for the mental sanity and physical development of the individual at the service of the nation, idea present later in the Estado Novo (dictatoship years).

Sport appears as a means of education and "national salvation" of the feeling of decay and agony that lived, through him to rejoice, to be reunited, to be asserted, to rejuvenate, and thus purify and strengthen the man.

It has been known that since the nineteenth century, physical education and sport were for states a way of militarizing "civil society", youth education, discipline of bodies and minds, medical hygiene and nationalist propaganda .

Through, for example, the national physical education parties.

Not forgetting music and art, archives and libraries have suffered deep reforms, establishing archives across the country and child reading rooms.

The thesis was approved by acclamation at the Congress of the Portuguese Primary Teacher held in Coimbra in August of that year.

The National Sport Library is an example of this investment, containing a profuse selection of works dedicated especially to sport, since the sixteenth century.