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Sir,
As the principal of a large training college for teachers, I venture to write to you in regard to the interesting article in The Times Educational Supplement of April 28 entitled "What Does 'Mental Age' Mean?"
The article refers to matters of fundamental importance in education, and should be followed up, if it is to be of practical service. As a pupil and disciple of Mr. F. Matthias Alexander I am struck by the similarity between the principles upon which Mr. Alexander bases his work and those referred to by your Correspondent. Mr. Alexander has devoted the greater part of his life to the solution of the problems touched upon in The Times article, and has, moreover, developed a wonderful technique which is the practical application of these principles, and with astonishing results. Mr. Alexander and your Correspondent both regard the human being as a unit or whole, and emphasize the impossibility of separating "mind" from "body." Mr. Alexander describes the human organism as "psycho-physical." Your Correspondent speaks of it as a "nervous" organism, body and mind being functions of a common factor. The human organism is, according to your Correspondent, capable of analysis and readjustment. Mr. Alexander, too, lays the greatest emphasis on these processes. "Adjustment" and "co-ordination" are the corner-stones in his scheme of re-education, but in his work "readjustment" and "co-ordination" are brought about by an actual change in the conditions of use and functioning, and his practical technique enables him to realize his aim of helping the "psycho-physical" organism to develop the power of controlling and directing itself consciously.
Your Correspondent realizes that the activities of body and mind are too frequently discordant, and wishes to harmonize the two. Professor John Dewey describes Mr. Alexander's work as being a "fundamental method of education, which, in the course of slow generations, will integrate into harmonious co-ordination our animal intelligence and our distinctively human capacities of intelligence." The importance of the environment in education is emphasized by your Correspondent. This factor is also fully recognized by Mr. Alexander; but he attaches even greater importance to a more direct process of perfecting the organism so that it can itself modify, or adapt itself to, its environment. Your Correspondent says we are apt to "fall into the habit of regarding mental ability as a fixed quantity, or even as one which may sink progressively below the average of advance." Mr. Alexander has proved that many children who have been diagnosed as sub-normal can, through re-education, become perfectly normal, and can rise progressively above the "average of advance"; but it will be found that in such cases an actual change has been made from the unsatisfactory conditions of use and functioning associated with the sub-normal to those satisfactory conditions of use and functioning associated with the normal. As your Correspondent does not refer to Mr. Alexander, I imagine he cannot be acquainted with his work, and yet Mr. Alexander is, I believe, the greatest authority on the science and art of the very type of re-education which your Correspondent has in mind.
Those of us who are concerned with problems of education welcome most heartily any pioneer work, more especially if it has been thoroughly tested and proved to be of real value. Professor John Dewey said, in reference to Mr. Alexander, that he was the only person he had ever heard of "who knows what he is talking about in the sense that a competent engineer knows when he is talking about his speciality." It is for this reason, among others, that I take this opportunity afforded by the special article in your columns of calling the attention of your readers to Mr. Alexander's remarkable work, which should, as one of his critics expresses it, "revolutionize education and put humanity on a new footing."
Esther E. Lawrence
Froebel Institute, London, S W.
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