The prominence of sport in American secondary school curriculum owes much to 19th-century child development theories, the most prominent of which, Von Baer's Law, held that youth passed through the same developmental gradations ontogenetically that the human race passed through phylogenetically; youth repeated in their development approximately…

Interlaken School (Indiana) was an elite boys' preparatory boarding school that combined Hall's definitive theory of adolescence and Spencer's theory of social evolution into both a philosophy and a pedagogy. Interlaken was portrayed as an isolated mythologized community that combined manual with mental development and believed that adolescent…