The Alexander Technique and Early Childhood Education

In a previous article, I wrote about harmful habits of posture and movement and how they are all too easily acquired by children when they start going to school - in large part because of the horrible furniture they are forced to use.

Another contributing factor is a lack of awareness by most adults of just how easy it is for small children to develop harmful physical patterns.

Take for example the process of teaching children how to write. "Penmanship", it was called when I was in school and it was a most unpleasant experience. My handwriting was judged not acceptable and for awhile, I was forced to stay after school for additional practice. But no matter how hard I tried to copy the perfect examples posted on the wall of my third-grade classroom, my writing just didn't measure up.

In hindsight, it is clear that my attempts to "get it right" probably made my writing worse and certainly contributed to a pattern of holding a lot of excess tension in my hands, arms and shoulders. It was only after I began taking Alexander Technique lessons some thirty years later that I learned how to release this harmful habit.

Think about what's involved in teaching a class of thirty 8-year olds how to write: Some of the children will learn this skill quite easily. But others - like me - will not, often because they simply have not yet developed the fine motor control necessary to move a pen or pencil in a precise way across a page. All too often, the pressure to "get it right" causes them to produce a lot of extra tension as they write, including scrunching themselves down over their desks.

From the classroom teacher's point of view, these scrunching children are "making an effort" and they may even be rewarded for their obvious desire to do well. After all, they're not disrupting the classroom as some of the other children may be doing, perhaps in frustration with being forced to learn something they're not ready for. Inadvertently, these tension patterns may be reinforced by their teacher's approval of their effort.

The problem is that these habits of tension often persist into adulthood. Take a look at what people around you do to themselves when they write - you'll often see shoulders hunched up, stiff hands and fingers and other forms of tension totally inappropriate to the task. If you have children, take a look at what they do when they take up pen and paper (or, for matter, when they use a computer keyboard). Take a look at yourself doing this in a mirror. You may be shocked at what you see!

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