“It is as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when commanded to cease burning as it is to suppose that a man can stand upright by direct action of thought and desire.” -Professor John Dewey
John Dewey is best known as a philosopher and the leading voice of the school of philosophy known as pragmatism, and for his profound influence on public education in the United States. In fact, he is often called the “father of American education.”
Why the hell was he writing about posture, of all things? Philosophers, we tend to assume, are concerned with ideas, not physical training.
And why can’t you stand upright by a “direct action of thought and desire”? Isn’t that what your parents and teachers, especially your physical education teachers, told you over and over again when you were little? And isn’t that what countless advice articles advise to prevent back pain, for example, when using a computer?
What other way is there?
To answer these questions, we must look at a remarkable association between Dewey and another great 20th century thinker: F. Matthias Alexander. Alexander was an Australian who developed an educational method that is now called “The Alexander Technique” and is widely used by people who want to learn how to release harmful tension from their bodies.
The two men met in New York during World War I when Dewey had a series of lessons with Alexander. These lessons had a profound impact on him. They taught him to stop and think before acting. He also credited them for allowing him to calmly hold a philosophical position, or change it if new evidence came his way.
They also helped him improve his own posture, coordination, breathing, and eyesight. It is fair to say that Dewey’s experiences with Alexander opened up new ways of seeing the world, himself, and his approach to philosophy and the world of ideas.
Their association lasted until Alexander’s death in 1955. Dewey wrote the introductions to three of Alexander’s books and referred to Alexander many times in his writings. In a chapter entitled “Habits of the Will” in Human Nature and Conduct, published a few years after his first lessons with Alexander, he explained in detail why direct approaches to good posture – admonitions to “stand tall” and the like the style – are doomed to failure.
Dewey tended to be a bit wordy, so I slightly edited his writing to make it more accessible. Here is part of what he wrote:
“A man who has habitually bad posture tells himself, or is told, to stand up straight. If he is interested and responds, he prepares himself, performs certain movements, and it is assumed that the desired result is substantially achieved; and that the position is held at least as long as the man has the idea or order in mind.
“Consider the assumptions made here. It is implied that the means…(to do it)…exist independently of established habit and may even be set in motion in opposition to habit…
“Now, indeed, a man who can stand correctly does, and only a man who can does. In the first case, decrees of the will are unnecessary, and in the second useless. Improperly, a positive, energetic habit .
“The common implication that your mistake is merely negative, that you are simply failing to do the right thing, and that the failure can be fixed by a will is absurd. One might well suppose that the man who is a slave to drinking whiskey is simply one who cannot drink water.
“The conditions have been formed to produce a bad result, and the bad result will occur as long as those conditions exist. They can no more be removed by a direct effort of the will than the conditions that create drought can be dissipated by whistling the wind.” It is just as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when it is ordered to stop burning, as it is to suppose that a man can straighten himself as a consequence of a direct action of thought and desire, the same occurs with the rectification of bad postures.
“Of course, something happens when a man acts on his idea of being upright. For a moment, he stands differently, but just in a different kind of wrong. Then he takes on the unaccustomed feeling that accompanies his unusual posture. as evidence that he’s now upright. But there are plenty of ways he’s been standing wrong, and he’s just changed his usual form into compensatory bad form at some opposite extreme.”
From Dewey’s experience, the solution lay in Alexander’s indirect approach. It is not based on the student simply wanting better posture. His method was to carefully identify the underlying causes of a student’s poor posture and then show him how to release them.
If, for example, a student is a typical “sleep” or “slouch”, pulling his shoulders forward and down into his chest, Alexander (and, today, Alexander Technique teachers) would show the student how to stop producing those pulls down and in so that your body expands to its full size.
Students learn to “get out of the way” of what happens naturally. An Alexander Technique teacher will never ask you to “straighten up” since that produces the useless Dewey stress rearrangement so well described.
This approach has proven itself over the years, and today the technique is considered by many to be the most effective way to improve posture and overall quality of physical functioning.
A complete collection of Dewey/Alexander material can be found on the John Dewey and FM Alexander home page at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/articles/dewey
Alexander’s books and many other books, videos, DVDs and audiobooks can be found at the Alexander Technique Bookstore at http://www.alexandertechnique.com/books
You can find a good source of information on John Dewey at http://www.siu.edu/~deweyctr/
Robert Rickover teaches the Alexander Technique in Lincoln, Nebraska and in Toronto, Canada. His website, The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique at http://www.alexandertechnique.com, is a comprehensive source of information on the Alexander technique.