School Chairs — Weapons of Mass Destruction!
I find that many people who come for Alexander Technique lessons are very interested in knowing why their posture and the way they use themselves rapidly deteriorated during their early part of life. Although there are a multitude of reasons, at least one of the causes is practically universal - school chairs and desks.
At the age of five nearly every child in westernised countries have to sit in a chair for long hours - she (or he) has no choice. A child of five does not like sitting down for more than a few moments, as they instinctively know that chair is very uncomfortable the main reason for this is that the horizontal part of the chair, which takes most of the weight of the body, is sloping backwards. The position is akin to someone sitting on the ground facing up a hill. The child is then forced to tense many of her muscles to maintain the upright posture that is so natural to young children. She does not like this feeling at all and within minutes will try to stand up or wander off. The teacher often having thirty and sometimes even forty children to cope with, cannot keep his eye on this many children unless they are at their desks and, since the teacher s main responsibility is for the safety of all these children, he will insist that they remain on their chairs. Still not liking the sense of falling backwards that the chair produces, nearly all the children tilt forwards by raising the back legs off the floor thus producing the effect of sitting on a forward sloping chair - this allows the child to maintain his posture effortlessly.
Children have a natural ingenuity and intelligence that surpasses all the superimposed learning that is placed on them. Instead of the adult asking why most children tilt their chairs forward, they will tell the child exactly what they themselves were taught, Don t swing on the chairs - you will break them! There is of course the danger element that someone could trip over the back legs or that the children might tilt too far, fall forward and hurt themselves, but it is interesting that it is usually the damage to the chair that people give as a reason. The damage to the child s posture is not even considered at this stage.
The child still does not give up she then develops the technique of tucking one leg underneath her and sitting on it, which also has the effect of raising up the pelvis, once again enabling her to keep her upright posture. This, in many cases, is actively discouraged as it can interfere with the flow of blood down the leg. The child then has to endure sitting in backward sloping chairs for literally thousands and thousands of hours. Sooner or later she begins to slump as her back muscles become more and more fatigued. To make the problem worse, the child then has to bend over her school work and since it is very difficult for her to use her hip joint (as the pelvis is already tilting backwards because the shape of the seat). She will then have to bend her spine, causing unnecessary wear and tear on the vertebrae and discs.
So, first in the name of education we ruin our children s posture and then, in our ignorance, we blame the children themselves for having poor posture. We tell them to sit up straight and put your shoulders back , and the only way to do this is to arch the lumber spine with more tension than ever. The child then begins to think that this is the way she ought to sit. Unfortunately, this posture becomes fixed within the body and can often remain with the child for the rest of her days, becoming progressively more painful as time goes on.
Since many of us have been through this same process, it is hardly surprising that there are millions of people today with tension related problems such as backpain, neck problems, asthma, arthritis, digestive problems and RSI to name but a few. So perhaps the true weapons of real weapons of mass destruction are right under our very noses - or should I say our sitting bones!
Richard Brennan is the author of several books on the Alexander Technique: he is also the director of the Alexander teacher training college, Ireland. He is the Irish national contact for Alexander Technique International (ATI) and co-founder of the Irish Society of Alexander Technique Teachers. (ISSAT) Further information at alexander.ie alexander.ie
