"I am continually being asked, both by friends and unknown correspondents, for my opinion concerning the correct type of chair, stool, desk or table to be used in order to prevent the bad habits which these pieces of furniture are supposed to have caused in schools. In my replies I have tried to demonstrate that the problem is being attacked from the wrong standpoint.
Suppose, for example, that there is an ideal chair, some wonderful arrangement of perfect angles, hollows and supports that will almost magically rectify or prevent every fault in the child's physical mechanism ... how is it possible for this ideal chair to be miraculously adaptable to every age and type of child?
No, what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture, but to educate our children. Give a child the ability to adapt himself within reasonable limits to his environment, and he will not suffer discomfort, nor develop bad physical habits, whatever chair or form you give him to sit upon"
F.M.Alexander, Man's Supreme Inheritance, Ed.Mouritz pg 93
Actually the "ideal chair" has already been invented, it is the stool. But what they are actually looking for, without recognising it, is a chair to collapse comfortably.
"When people are wrong, the thing which is right is bound to be wrong to them"
F.M.Alexander, Teaching Aphorisms.
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