DEVELOPING PHYSICAL EDUCATION: CONCEPTIONS OF THE AGE PERIODISATION OF CHILDHOOD IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES

Abstract

Summary. The article analyses scholarly approaches to the age periodisation of childhood in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an important theoretical and methodological basis for organising the physical education[1] of children and adolescents. It identifies the principal approaches to delineating the age-related stages of a child’s development, taking into account anatomical and physiological, psychological, pedagogical and social criteria. The study establishes that, throughout the period under examination, conceptions of the age boundaries of childhood were transformed in line with the advancement of scholarly knowledge about the regularities of physical and mental development, the processes of bodily maturation, leading types of activity and age-related neoformations.

It is shown that the definition of age boundaries is of considerable importance for physical education, since it makes it possible to take into account the morphological and functional capacities of the body, the pace of physical development, the features of the psycho-emotional sphere and the nature of the leading activity of children and adolescents when selecting the content, forms, methods and means of physical upbringing.

The article characterises the features of contemporary approaches to assessing the physical development of children and adolescents as set out in the recommendations and standards of the twenty-first century, in which indicators of height, body weight, physical development and the functional capacities of the body acquire particular importance.

It is demonstrated that scholarly conceptions of the age periodisation of childhood in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries constitute an important foundation for identifying the regularities of physical and mental development, age-related crises, leading activity and individual rates of maturation, and thereby contribute to a well-founded selection of the means of physical upbringing and to the creation of conditions for the harmonious development and preservation of the health of the younger generation.