“It is as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when commanded to cease burning as to suppose that a man can be held 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 I writing about posture, of all things? Philosophers, we tend to assume, are concerned with ideas, not with physical training.

And why can’t you keep yourself 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 thinker of the 20th century: 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 with allowing him to calmly maintain a philosophical position, or change it if new evidence was presented to him.

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 titled “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 things to style – are doomed to fail.

Dewey tended to be a bit verbose, so I slightly edited his writing to make it more accessible. Here is part of what he wrote:

“A man who has habitual bad posture tells himself, or is told, to stand up straight. If he is interested and responds, he prepares himself, makes certain movements, and it is assumed that the desired result is substantially achieved; and that the position is retained 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 so)…exist independently of established habit and may even be set in motion in opposition to habit…

“Now, in fact, a man who can stand properly does, and only a man who can. In the first case, decrees of the will are unnecessary, and in the second useless. Improperly, a positive, energetic habit.

“The common implication that his error is merely negative, that he is simply failing to do the right thing, and that the failure can be repaired by command of the will is absurd. One might well suppose that the man who is a slave to drinking whiskey is simply one who cannot drink water.

“Conditions have been formed to produce an evil result, and the evil result will occur as long as those conditions exist. They cannot be removed by a direct effort of the will any more than the conditions that create drought can be dissipated by whistling to call the wind It is just as reasonable to expect a fire to go out when ordered to stop burning as it is to suppose that a man can stand up as a consequence of a direct action of thought and desire, the same is true of the rectification of bad postures.

“Of course, something happens when a man acts according to his idea of ​​being upright. For a moment he stands differently, but only from a different kind of evil. Then he takes on the unaccustomed feeling that accompanies his unusual posture as evidence that he is now upright. But there are many ways to be poorly standing, and he has simply changed from his usual form to compensatory poor 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 to have a better posture. His method was to carefully identify the underlying causes of a student’s poor posture and then show them how to release them.

If, for example, a student is a typical “asleep” or “slouch”, pulling their shoulders forward and down into their chest, Alexander (and, today, teachers of the Alexander Technique) will show the student how to stop producing those downward and inward jerks 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” as this produces the useless Dewey rearrangement of stresses 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 the overall quality of physical function.

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

A good source of information on John Dewey can be found 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.