It is remarkable that the lengthy report of the Committee on Physical Education and its appendix containing the history of physical education makes no mention of the most comprehensive and most scientifically conceived method of education which embraces within its processes true physiological physical education. I refer to the method of F. Matthias Alexander of London.

Starting from his still little-realized discovery that human sensory appreciation is defective, Alexander realized that these degenerations, which have been the stimulus to the present and earlier inquiries, were the outcome of misdirection of our bodies, occasioned by imperfect consciousness of what was happening at the termini of lines of sensory communication, coupled with complete lack of knowledge of the physiological means whereby directions, not manifestly misdirections, could be brought into being. In seeking to find how sensory appreciation could be made more reliable, and how misdirections, the coincidents of degenerations, could be prevented, he came upon the key to physiological direction within the animal body. This key was a complex of cerebral activity, awakened by sensory appreciations, dispatching impulses along still-to-be-discovered nerve paths to muscle groups acting coordinately throughout the body, with the primary resolve of all these activities that the head was given a certain relation to its co-ordinate part ­ the neck. To this subtle complex, which could be impressed upon consciousness, and could be aroused when consciousness was fully alert by the flow of environmental stimuli, Alexander gave the name primary control. Permitted its physiological urge, this primary control conditioned secondary controls and directions throughout the body; and it may be observed that the functional result, the consequence of the activity of these controls, is the aim of the physical educationalist, to wit, a unified being, balanced in the interaction of his mental and physical processes, obedient to that first discipline, his own physiology, and with ever quickened sensitiveness to his own functioning and his responses to his environment. But Alexander's discoveries and the application of his principles of technique mean much more than this, for they imply the use of the whole body in all man's activities, and include no such absurdities as the setting aside of an hour a week or a day for physical education, while during the remaining time degeneration continues as before.

The report suggests that the inquirers did not direct themselves to the causes calling for the need of physical culture, but rather to a consideration of common methods of physical culture now extant. Had they directed themselves to causes they would have discovered that none of the systems they considered took cognizance of the needs to be met by a satisfactory system.