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AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK HOW ARE WE LIVING OUR LIVES?:
GRETHE LAUB, INTERVIEW AND TALKS, 1982 - 1988
AN ALEXANDER TEACHER’S VIEW OF CHILD EDUCATION
An interview with Grethe Laub, Copenhagen, May 1982
INTRODUCTION
By Joe Armstrong
Little has been said since the 1930’s about the value of the Alexander
Technique to education except in Alexander’s own writings and those of one of
his distinguished pupils, the educationist and philosopher John Dewey.
Alexander’s four books have scarcely reached educational spheres at all, and
Dewey’s major ideas on education still cause controversy and debate. Few
people know of the connection between the two men, nor are they aware of the
current opinion that Dewey’s theories cannot be properly understood or put
into practice unless they are backed by fairly substantial experience of
Alexander’s discoveries about the ‘use of the self’.
Dewey believed (in 1932) that Alexander’s Technique contains “the promise and
potentiality of the new direction that is needed in all education.” He even
went so far as to write that it “provides therefore the conditions for the
central direction of all special educational processes,” and that “it bears
the same relation to education that education itself bears to the rest of
life.”4
In Australia before the turn of the century, F. Matthias Alexander
(1869-1955) developed a method of teaching that is concerned in a fundamental
way with helping people to achieve an integrated ‘use’ of themselves that can
ultimately provide freedom from the bonds of habit and unwanted automatic
behavior. The method gives a means for change and furnishes us with a freedom
of choice in our own growth and development in every sphere of endeavor.
Insisting on the impossibility of separating ‘mind’ from ‘body’, he also used
his Technique to give the actual practical demonstration of that claim; and
he and others he trained have taught it on an individual basis to this day.
He found “that a particular relativity of the head to the neck and the head
and neck to the other parts of the organism tended to improve general use and
functioning of the organism as a whole, and that the motivation for this use
was from the head downwards, and, futher, that any other particular
relativity tended towards the opposite effect.”5 He called the conscious
direction of this use the ‘Primary Control’; and he showed how every action
and every thought could be carried out with extraordinary effectiveness if
this concept of Primary Control is used as our central ‘means whereby’ we
gain any end.
Alexander believed that the greatest hope for the future of civilization
rested on the education of the young, but he found much cause to criticize
the rigid educational methods in conventional schools of his day as well as
the ‘free expression’ schools he saw developing in the early 1900’s. His idea
of teaching children as if they were young plants and drawing them out to
light and warmth and leading them into the conditions most helpful for their
development6 was not so different from Froebel’s theory, which Grethe Laub
refers to in this interview; and no doubt ideas of this kind are found more
and more in contemporary teaching approaches. But what Alexander specifically
proposed as a revision of educational method to incorporate fully his
practical discoveries has been touched on rarely since he and Dewey suggested
it many years ago.
Alexander established a small school that was run by some of the teachers he
trained at Penhill in Kent, England and in America at Stowe, Massachusetts
during World War II; but it dealt mainly with children who had special
difficulties and operated only for a few years. Several schools in England
have recently experimented with Alexander’s Technique, and an Alexander
teacher was actually employed for several years in a school in Copenhagen,
Denmark.7 But these later attempts have operated only on the periphery
instead of at the heart of the classroom, serving as little more than a kind
of sophisticated ‘physical education’.
To my knowledge, Grethe Laub is one of the few people living who has worked
so extensively as a nursery school teacher, a regular school teacher, and
also as a qualified Alexander teacher teaching children privately for many
years. Over the last fifteen years I had the privilege and delight of hearing
brief accounts of her work with children; and after each conversation with
her I felt more certain that she had some special knowledge of how to use the
Alexander Technique in teaching children that few people have ever really
realized. Finally, it seemed to me that her experiences and impressions
should not be lost; so I persuaded her to let me ask her particular questions
about her life and thoughts on teaching to see if we could develop something
valuable for others to read, especially Alexander teachers.
In many ways it seems that with this interview we have only made a start on
the subject. To grasp the full nature of Grethe’s experience and
understanding, one would need to meet her and talk with her, and particularly
to experience her own Alexander teaching. Therefore I urge any Alexander
teacher who is seriously interested in working with children to do this. But
I hope, even more, that other teachers, especially nursery school teachers,
might be inspired to meet and work with her too.
Joe Armstrong
Teacher of the Alexander Technique
Boston, January 1984
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