Posture Miseducation in our Schools
The other day I happened to see a half-hour video on posture designed to be shown in the public schools. It appeared to be aimed at middle-school students.
I was quite impressed by the first twenty minutes or so of the video. The narrator covered a number of reasons why students might develop poor posture, with emphasis on the psychological and social pressures faced by children in our society. He also did an excellent job of explaining the harmful physical effects of poor posture - shallow breathing, restricted circulation, back and shoulder pain etc.
The narrator was a man of about thirty who had very good posture himself. As he alternated between sitting on a high stool and standing he demonstrated - without specifically talking about it - what good posture looks like.
But then, in the final minutes of the video, he addressed the question of how students could improve their posture. His basic message? "Stand (or sit) up straight." In other words, pretty much what parents and teachers sometimes tell their kids and what passes for posture advice in most magazine and newspaper articles on the subject.
Interestingly enough, when the narrator illustrated "standing up straight" he stiffened himself a bit, thereby losing his natural easy upright stance.
Admonishing someone to "stand up straight" is at best useless advice. When children are told to do this, they typically do what they need to get the parent or teacher off their case. Usually they stiffen themselves up, lifting their chest and pulling their shoulders back. More often than not they will also arch their lower back a bit.
This semi-military stance typically lasts for a minute or so and then they're back in their usual slump. Which is just as well because all they've done to "stand up straght" is rearrange the pattern of tensions in their body. And perhaps develop some antagonism to the person who told them to do this - and to the whole notion of posture improvement.
Professor John Dewey, the American philosopher, public education reformer and longtime student of F. M. Alexander, the developer of the Alexander Technique, had a very clear understanding of the problem:
"It is," he wrote, "as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop burning as to suppose that a man can stand straight in consequence of a direct action of thought and desire. The fire can be put out only by changing objective conditions; it is the same with rectification of bad posture.
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