The Kinaesthetic Systems concerned with correct and healthy bodily movements and postures have become demoralized by the habits engendered in the schoolroom through the restraint enforced at a time when natural activity should have been encouraged and scientifically directed, and in the crouching positions necessitated by useless and irrational deskwork.
F Matthias Alexander
While listening to an educational programme on the radio recently, I heard the Principal of a school express his concern about the changes he saw in children during their school years. He reported that he saw children aged four or five arriving each morning with bright eyes, smiling faces, beautiful posture and ease of movement; they were nearly always talkative, eager to please, willing to learn, with a playful nature, and generally enthusiastic about life. By the time these same children left the school in their late teens, however, he noticed that they hardly looked anyone in the eye, their posture was very stooped, they had developed rounded shoulders and hunched backs, they were often lazy and uninterested in the environment around them and they generally looked unhappy. ‘What’, he was asking, ‘in the name of education are we doing to our children to make them change so dramatically?’
That is a very important question to ask, but unfortunately for the children not many people ask it. In the early 1950s an investigation was carried out in London on 892 girls and 960 boys aged between 2 and 17 years of age. The report was published by the Research Board for the Correlation of Medical Science and Physical Education. It was found that more than 600 boys and 700 girls had flat feet; 238 boys and 377 girls had hammer toes; at least 702 boys and 718 girls had bent or defective toes, and more than 450 boys and 420 girls had overlapping toes. Furthermore, legs of uneven length were found in 114 boys and 109 girls, and 266 boys and 319 girls had either knock knees or were bow legged. Abnormal curvature of the spine was found in 408 boys and 526 girls, and 337 boys and 372 girls were found to have faulty carriage of their heads, i.e. the head was tilted to one side or bent forwards or backwards. Investigators found that most of the defects and deformities tended to become steadily worse as the children got older. All of this added up to a recipe for disaster in later life, and I am sure that today the situation is far worse. All of the above statistics point to the fact that even in the 1950s many children were a long way from the balanced poise, and in my opinion children’s posture is far worse today.
16: Carrying a heavy school bag on one shoulder can put huge pressures on the spine, as is clearly revealed in this X-ray image. This pressure can sow the seeds of future health problems.
17: The weight of school bags often exceeds recommended international industrial guidelines for handling of loads by adults, but who enforces or even checks these guidelines when it comes to children?
In his book Body Awareness in Action, Professor Frank Pierce Jones states that two of the most powerful stimuli for producing malposture are a book and a pencil, and it is easy to see that children’s posture starts to change within a few years of beginning school. Poor posture in teenagers is now widespread in developed countries, and we are beginning to see it as normal, yet although it is very common it is definitely neither normal nor natural. Many people do not realize that the seeds of ill health are needlessly being sown due to our education system, which has become totally ‘results driven’.
Perhaps all this comes about because, for 11 years of our children’s development, we place them in an institution full of ‘must’, ‘have to’, ‘can’t’, ‘should’, ‘got to’ and ‘ought to’. This has the damaging effect of causing children gradually to lose their freedom to choose. If you imprison a bird, at first it will damage itself in its endeavour to escape, every day longing for its freedom to fly unhindered, but if you keep the bird in its cage long enough it will forget that there is anything outside the cage at all. Then, even if you leave the cage door open, the bird will not try to escape – it has resigned itself to being in the cage and has forgotten that there is any other way of existing. In the same way, many children scream, shout and have tantrums during their first days of school, but they ‘have to’ go, and even the most loving parents will leave their children crying at the school gate regardless of their feelings and parental instincts, because they believe it is ‘for their own good’. This can have a detrimental effect on the children, as it may well be the first time they feel abandoned and betrayed, not understanding that the parents themselves really feel that they have no choice.
It is true that, after a few weeks of trauma, children will ‘settle down’, but what is in fact happening is that they are becoming institutionalized as they learn to conform to what society considers to be the norm. It is not long before many parents can see signs of a change in their children’s behaviour as they become more and more withdrawn. By the time these children leave school many years later as young adults they have been conditioned to think and act in certain ways, acquiring fixed prejudices and rigid opinions that often remain with them for the rest of their lives. They feel they must act in a way that fits in with the rest of society, and that if they do not they will be ostracized by their fellow human beings, due to the same prejudices and fears that they have been indoctrinated with during those school years. Yet it is not education that really is the problem, it is the way in which we educate our children. Michael Gelb sums it up in his book, Body Learning, when he says:
This ‘disconnected’ approach is also evident in our educational system which over-emphasises examination results at the expense of real learning. Our children are fed vast quantities of discrete and often unrelated information which they must parrot back on demand. They are drilled and judged on their performance in a series of disconnected topics. Physical education is usually seen as just another ‘subject’, quite separate and not as important as the traditional three R’s. Indeed the very term ‘physical education’ suggests the belief that the mind and body can be educated separately.
If education were enjoyable for children, then their posture would reflect that enjoyment and in my view they would not only learn far more quickly, but also learn far more. In fact, children up to the age of five learn a huge amount; most of it is through play without the fear of failure. They learn to stand, walk and talk, and they learn all this in a very effective way, which is generally by copying. Unfortunately, the school system that has evolved over the past century does not take into account how children learn best.
The constant pressure to perform under stressful conditions, whether it is applied at school or later on at work, is one of the primary causes of our degenerating quality of life and ultimately of the stress from which so many of us suffer. A great many people feel that something is missing from their lives, yet because everyone else is in the same position they do not know where to turn for advice on increasing their enjoyment of life, and many just end up trying harder and harder, which is exactly the opposite of what they really need to do. Practically every report I brought home from school said, ‘Must make more effort’ or ‘Could try harder’, and this is what many people believe life is all about. We make a bigger and bigger effort, yet we end up being further away from the peace and contentment that we long for. In this stressful process we become so anxious that the small pockets of happiness we do experience become less and less frequent. Life is in reality full of pleasure, if we could just stop long enough to appreciate the here and now, rather than hoping that things will get better in the future.
18: Long hours bent over a desk can be one of the major causes of poor posture. It can adversely affect breathing and overall wellbeing.
Alexander was also a firm believer that our education system did not address the real needs of our children, and as a result in 1924 he and his assistants opened a school for children in London. Irene Tasker, a teacher trained by Maria Montessori and also an Alexander teacher, ran what came to be known as ‘The Little School’, which incorporated teaching children the principles of the Alexander Technique as part of the curriculum. This school offered a completely different approach to education and did not overstimulate the children’s nervous systems, avoiding any over-stimulation of the fear reflexes. The way in which children were taught always took precedence over how much they were taught. This led to calmer emotions and a more open way of learning. In Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Alexander wrote:
“I recommend the Alexander treatment as an extremely sophisticated form of rehabilitation, or rather redeployment, of the entire muscular equipment, and through that of many other organs. Compared with this, many types of physiotherapy which are now in general use look surprisingly crude and restricted in their effect, and sometimes even harmful to the rest of the body.
His [Alexander’s] procedure and conclusions meet all the requirements of the strictest scientific method. It [Alexander’s technique] bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities.”
Dr Alexander Leeper, in a report to the Australian Federal Government’s Schools and Registration Board
It occurs to very few parents to consider whether, in this process of ‘education’ the child’s fear reflexes will not be unduly and harmfully excited by the injunction that it must always try to ‘be right’, indeed, that it is almost a disgrace to be wrong; that the teachers concerned do not even know how to prevent the child from acquiring the very worst psycho-physical use of itself whilst standing or sitting at its desk or table, pondering over its lessons, or performing its other duties.
The habits formed in the school years tend to surface when we later, as adults, try to learn a new subject. The fear of being wrong can develop into a very harmful habit and can really hold us back from learning new subjects, because, of course, in practice, learning anything new always involves making mistakes. John Dewey, the famous philosopher and educator, who was a staunch supporter of Alexander’s work, was convinced that people learn far more from making mistakes than from trying to be right. If we have a fear of making mistakes, we tend to hold our breath and assume a harmful posture, as we overexert ourselves, in the same way we did as children while learning to read and write. As adults, we often take these harmful habits into everything that we do and they can affect the way we live our lives, as well as our health.
Recently, neuroscientists have realized that our brain has a quality of what they call ‘competitive plasticity’. This simply means that any area in the brain can change its function when required and that the neurological brain map is not static, but can alter to suit the needs of the person. If an area is not used for any given length of time, it will be taken over and used by another of the body’s functions. In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Dr Norman Doidge writes:
Competitive plasticity also explains why our bad habits are so difficult to break or unlearn. Most of us think of the brain as a container and learning as putting something in it. When we try to break a bad habit, it takes over the brain map and each time we repeat it, it claims more control of the map and prevents the use of that space for good habit. That is why unlearning is often a lot harder than learning, and why early childhood education is so important – it’s best to get it right early before the ‘bad habits’ get a competitive advantage.
Back in the 1920s, Alexander did not know about modern neuroscience, but he did realize that the prevention of bad habits was far preferable to trying to unlearn them. He also realized that in order to unlearn an undesirable habit, one has to say ‘no’ to it many times in order for the brain to learn a new way, and this is why he required his students to have lessons daily so that the pupil did not have time to fall back into their old ways of thinking and moving.
19: Eventually, the bent posture we adopt from working at a school desk for over 15,000 hours becomes a strong habit, which you can easily see in most teenagers.
“Alexander students rid themselves of bad postural habits and are helped to reach with their bodies and minds an enviable degree of freedom of expression.”
Michael Langham, Director, The Juilliard School, New York, USA
John Taylor Gatto, an American teacher and winner of the Teacher of the Year Award three years running, had these strong words to say about the state of education in his article ‘Confessions of a Teacher’ (published in Resurgence magazine in the 1990s): ‘By stars and red ticks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach you (the child) to surrender your will to the predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal because rights do not exist inside a school, not even the right of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled. As a school teacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behaviour that threatens my control. As individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children and teenagers, my judgments come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.’
The self-confidence that very young children naturally possess can be maintained only in the absence of stress, confusion, uncertainty and, most of all, the fear of failure. Unfortunately, these are the very forces inflicted upon many children to ‘keep them under control’. My aim here is not to blame individual teachers or parents, but rather to reflect on the way in which education has evolved as a whole. Because of our own experiences, we also can behave as our own parents or teachers behaved, unwittingly contributing to the pressure on our children. How frequently do we tell our children how wonderful they are, or how well they are doing? Sadly, we are often far too busy nowadays even to notice. Their ‘naughty’ behaviour patterns are usually a desperate attempt to get noticed or to relieve boredom.
The way in which we were treated as children has an enormous influence on how we live the rest of our lives, and many of the behaviour patterns that we repeat through our adult lives are formed in early childhood. As children, we learn everything we know from mimicking those around us, and at first we do not even judge the actions that we are copying. The habits acquired then often only emerge 20 or 30 years later, when we have children of our own. Children are not born with fixed opinions or prejudices; these are acquired without question from the environment in which they live. It can be useful to question aspects of our lives to see if we are living as we would choose to, or merely trying to live up to other people’s expectations without realizing it.
20: The unnatural and unhealthy bend in the upper spine, which is often caused by working for long hours at the school desk, soon feels ‘normal’ in every action we do.
Although we are not individually to blame for the goal-oriented way that education has developed, we do have a responsibility to change it. The best way that we can help children is to stop imposing rigid rights and wrongs, in order to reduce the level of fear that they experience (what Alexander called ‘unduly excited fear reflexes’). If we can give them confidence by encouraging them, rather than promoting fear of ridicule and punishment for getting things wrong, we will be helping them in a fundamental way to improve their wellbeing, which in turn will beneficially affect their posture. If we can teach our children in a way that enhances their self-esteem, they will not only learn more, but also lead more harmonious and creative lives.
Another consideration in all this is that of speed. Not only do we want our children to have a great deal of knowledge about as much as possible, we also want them to put it down on paper as fast as possible. If you remember the time when you were sitting your own exams, you were probably given so little time to complete the paper that you felt rushed from the moment you sat down. This again excites what Alexander called ‘the fear reflexes’ and in turn affects posture. This pressure to rush many of our activities is such an important point that I have dedicated the whole of the next chapter to it.
