A Guide to the History of Physical Education

PER HENRIK LING, FATHER OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN SWEDEN.

For more than a century gymnastics in Sweden has been undergoing development along three more or less distinct lines, educational, military, and medical, _i.e._, as an integral factor in school life, as an agent in the training of men for the army and navy, and as a therapeutic measure. The Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics at Stockholm, where teachers of these various branches receive their preparation, was opened in 1814, and its originator and first director (1814-1839) was Per Henrik Ling. He was born November 15, 1776, in Småland, one of the southern provinces, where his ancestors had lived for seven generations or more. Up to the time of his grandfather, Mathias Månsson (1687-1748), they had belonged to the peasant class; but this man, taking the name Ling, prepared himself for the ministry and married a clergyman's daughter. His son, Lars Peter Ling (1723-1780), who followed the same calling, was settled in the country parish of Ljunga, in Kronoberg county, and died there when Per Henrik, the youngest of six children, was only four years of age. A year and a half later the mother, a great granddaughter of the famous Swedish author Olof Rudbeck and herself a woman of superior intelligence, married the new pastor, but died in 1789.[111]