Today, more than half a century after his death, the vision to integrate AT in normal schools continues to exist. Other alternative education approaches that emerged at a similar time, like Rudolf Steiner's approach, are nowadays much more wide-spread, only one school, the Educare Small School, integrates FM Alexander's ideas into a different way to educate children.
Schools are meant to provide pupils with the skills needed to become a productive member of society, and by and large do so. The skills required in the 21st century, in the Information Age, differ a lot from those for the Industrial Age. The job I earned my first money with didn't exist when I started school, and the specific job title might no longer be in use already. Traditional crafts and industrial production underwent some changes, yet these areas seem static in comparison to those of the Information economy.
I can't tell when the first 'web designer' position was filled, but certainly the school system from which this first web designer emerged didn't take his/her needs into consideration. Besides, of course, transferring basic numeracy and literacy skills. In Germany, it takes 13 years to qualify for university study. When I started in uni, I noticed the change in learning style. We were supposed to have learned 'how to learn' already, and were simply given massive amounts of new information, basically to be regurgitated at a higher and faster level than in school. Learning how to learn, however, was never really taught in the schools i went to.
Instead of finishing uni, I decided to do an apprenticeship in the just emerging IT area. The goals for the exams along the way were much clearer, and related much more to the job I took up afterwards. By that time, I had spend already a whopping 18 years in various education systems, yet finally had some formal license to earn money with a 'real' occupation, instead of just make little money out of casual jobs.
Most of the things I needed to know at various exam times were gone, and seem in retrospect like an utter waste of time. I still appreciate the decent level of literacy and numeracy I came out with, and learning a second language, yet especially the 'science' part was probably outdated when it was taught, most of it certainly is now.
That comes only as a little surprise to me now. Most teachers specialise in a couple of topics for a specific age group. Once they have their 'license to teach', there is little need to update their own topical knowledge, after all, they have to follow a given curriculum. If a teacher deviates from the curriculum, it disturbs the scheduled learning process, overall, there's little room for creativity. I do remember some incidences during my school time when I was punished for thinking for myself, luckily, I had some other teachers fostering individual reasoning.
Asking the wrong questions was considering as going against the flow. In a way, that holds entirely true - pupils need to follow through an artificial curriculum that require the repetition of more or less arbitrary data set. The basic skills of reading, writing and calculating are still taught, yet more and more children manage to leave school without mastery of these basic cultural skills.
So what should an education system result in? Can we identify specific goals to reach in public education?
Humans are excellent problem solver, and the accumulated solutions available provide the future of society. We manipulate symbol systems (words, numbers) to solve problems, considering experiences derived from others or our own experiments. This is an inherently cooperative process, and the quality of social interaction thus influences the fruit of any cooperation.
Any education system needs the development of
- basic cultural skills like reading, writing and calculating
- basic social skills like cooperation to solve problems
- the ability to obtain topical knowledge by proxy
- the ability to obtain topical knowledge by experiment
- the ability to apply topical knowledge to train problem solving skills
- self-awareness to incorporate problem solving skills in a healthy way
The last item might come as a surprise, and all of these items are subject to discussion. I just consider it difficult to agree on any kind of educational reform until simple goals are defined. This list shifts the focus more towards the development of skills than to 'knowledge transfer', which seems the current focus. The inclusion of self-awareness reflect the call to have a 'responsible' young adult coming out the mills of the education system, and Alexander Technique can help to integrate this area.
Although we are primarily social beings, the education system still prefers 'each for themself' approach. Even worse, with skilled manual labour more and more diminishing in 'economic' importance, schools train the 'mind', with a bit of Physical Education patched on top, to cater for the need and want of movement, especially in young people. 'Sit still' might be less important in the school life of 2011 than it was just 30 years ago, yet the 'body' gets ignored while the 'mind' is trained.
Yet a nervous system wired for social interaction, equipped with mirror neurons to mimic movement patterns, doesn't stop to learn how to adapt. The body language of a teacher transmits often more 'knowledge' than his/her words, most of the time entirely subconscious, and definitely ignored in any curriculum I know of. Being a school teacher is just a job like any other, with very passionate people, and as well with very frustrated people following a given structure that exhibits some obvious flaws.
We developed standards to 'measure' the quality of education, obsessed with scores fitting nicely into bell curves. 'Mental' abilities set the standard, body awareness and social skills develop as well, but mainly ignored as part of the curriculum. The 'one size fits all' approach breeds mediocrity, and provides little to those how fail the average, which seems to steadily drop in overall quality.
Someone who spends lots of their own attention in places outside the presence will have a hard time giving attention to a bunch of school children. The little bit left for the classroom situation suffices for those in favour, and a strict curriculum prevent creating a learning environment driven by interest.
Before learning is channeled among ideals of society, it's mere fun. The first words, the first steps of a human being bring immediate and massive pleasure for all involved, and the amount of skills we develop before any formal education can be staggering. In a global society, the problem that need solving require a lot of creativity, which is all to often quenched in the process of socialisation in school.
The fixed sets of subjects taught in school only reflects the needs of the past industrial society, but fails to create an understanding of the interconnected reality of the contemporary global society. It will require individual flexibility on the teaching side to foster an interest-driven education. As a result, someone able to take responsibility for themselves together with an others, capable of solving problems that make life easier and more enjoyable for most of us will leave the education system.
At the moment, cultural knowledge seems much more important than applicable knowledge, and I think we need both to achieve to provide children with a basis to live, work and prosper in the modern age. Dissolving a fixed curriculum would require teachers to facilitate learning, instead of imposing it. Alexander Technique provides the tool to make this happen, to give educators the ability and flexibility to teach children skills for life in alignment with their talents and weaknesses. If we learn how we do the things we do, we can learn what we want to do.
