First published in The Alexandrian Vol. IV, no. 2, 1985.
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This monograph can be strongly recommended to anyone who cares for children, whether as a teacher or a parent. All of us who have experienced the benefits of the Alexander Technique for ourselves have at some time pondered the question: “How do you teach the Alexander Technique to a child?” Ann Mathew’s brilliant thesis gives an answer based on practical experience and profound thought and it is both original and persuasive.
To most of us, the essential difficulty lies in conceiving how such a technique can be satisfactorily taught as a subject in a school curriculum. The striking feature of our first Alexander lessons was the experience of lightness and freedom we gained from somebody else’s hands; but clearly such a process demands a degree of individual attention difficult to provide in a classroom. Furthermore, children, for the most part, would appear to need less of this helping hand than the average pulled-down and malcoordinated adult. They need more of an approach that will kindle interest in how their bodies work, in what they are able to do if they want to, in how to cultivate different skills, in how they use themselves and their individual endowment to the best advantage. They need help and encouragement to feel and think and reason and to sue all their faculties in whatever they are doing.
It may be remembered, however, that Alexander himself did not enjoy the benefit of another person’s hands. His experience of his own technique was quite different from ours. It was, for him, a matter of observation and experiment and then of understanding and conscious awareness of how his body worked. The benefits that he derived were the product of a complex process of rational thought, of choice and decision, of conscious direction and refusal to give consent to what he saw to be wrong, of the exercise of the will. He was fond of children and had a natural gift for communicating with them. It is said that he wrote much of Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual with his adopted daughter Peggy sitting on his knee. He thought and wrote a great deal about the problems of teaching children and the principles which, as he put it, “will enable us to decide as to the best methods of educating our children.” It may be recalled that he wrote: “The characteristic note of true happiness is struck when the healthy child is busily engaged in doing something which interests it.” He was convinced that most children love to apply their natural curiosity for finding out “how it works” to themselves. He said that especially they loved to be invited to play a game of “withholding consent,” of saying “no” to a request calling for an immediate, habitual, and unthinking response, to be invited to think what they are doing.
How this sort of teaching can be carried out in a public school classroom is the subject of Ann Mathew’s “experimental project”, and her conclusions invite close study and consideration. She says: “It is my feeling that a serious student of the Technique who has begun to be aware, has confronted some habits and begun to change, can work with young children with a greater or lesser degree of success. This is so because, although habit may seem to be entrenched, children’s bodies are not yet set as they will be later on. In addition, children are much closer in time than adults to their own instinctive natural use and proprioceptive awareness, and this makes the re-education a simpler matter for child and teacher.” She has produced a fascinating account of her research and we are all very much in her debt.
© Walter Carrington. Reproduced with permission.
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This edition © Mouritz 2005. All rights reserved. |
