My first attempt to overview conductive practice drew largely from available written sources It opened as follows:
I remembered this earlier today when, responding to a comment by the correspondent whom I know of as ‘Anonymous Aenna’. She had written (see Comments to http://bit.ly/18UuKd) that, over her so-far thirteen years involvement with Conductive Education, she has become aware of the beginnings of a shift in the focus of conductors’ practice:
…communicating more the conduction, the conductive upbringing, to the parents to make it part of and relevant to their daily life.
She added:
Now we just need someone to write this down and I think we are on to something.
Works of the spirit
I therefore replied as follows to Anonymous Aenna:
[Susie Mallett’s] very personal reports of being a 'conductor' (as the title of her blog announces) are as valid a contribution to the conductive-pedagogic literature as is what people conventionally call ‘scientific research’.
Her writing combines three features:
- aspects of the pedagogue’s own personal life and values, art, music, interests, concerns etc
- along with observations and insights of the human, emotional and spiritual lives of the clients (with the word ‘clients’ here being family- rather than individually oriented)
- - AND the everyday pleasures, displeasures, pains and excitements of what actually happens between conductors and clients.
This is an ad hoc, rough-and-ready analysis but it does seem to generalises as far as the 'autobiographical' writings of Makarenko, which are in part at least works of the imagination. These three features are, however, little apparent in the bulk of what people can presently read about Conductive Education, in Hungarian, English or German. The list is not intended to be prescriptive, though it may have heuristic value for those looking to help create a conductive-pedagogic literature. and of course real, literary 'literature' might be somewhat different, as suggested below.
You may or may not like Anton Makarenko and his pedagogy but there is no denying the force of his methodology when it came to communicating the essence of pedagogic ideas (and practice). I think that I am right in saying that he was the biggest-selling writer on education of all time.
What did he do? He told a story? What about? Life. The road to it!
Not a bad precedent for a school of ‘imaginative’ writing within Conductive Education.
L. N. Tolstoi
Then by coincidence, later in the morning I was sorting through a veritable mountain of lecture materials that I used for teaching student-conductors, going back to 1997, no longer required for their original purpose but still perhaps utilisable for I know not yet what. I came across a photocopy of three pages of a small book from my own undergraduate years, from when I was studying Russian Literature, L. N. Tolstoi’s tiny short story, ' Little girls wiser than men'
I loved Tolstoi as a writer, in all his extraordinary phases. When I used to teach a very long module called ‘Pedagogy and psychology for conduction’, if there was time, I would read the following little instructional tale of his aloud to second-year students-conductors. Partly this was to open for them a window on to a quite different pedagogical philosophy from their own (yes, Tolstoi was an influential educational reformer in his time). Partly it was to illustrate the methodological point that you do not have to say explicitly what you mean in order to get your meaning across very forcefully indeed, and that this goes for pedagogic writing as for any other!
Here it is, in full:
Little girls wiser than men
EASTER CAME EARLY; people had only just stopped travelling by sleigh. Snow still lay in the farmyards, and rivulets ran through the village. A large puddle had been formed in a lane between two farms by streams passing through the muck of the farmyards, and two little girls from different houses, one younger, one older, were playing by the puddle. Both had been dressed by their mothers in new smocks. The little one was in blue, the bigger in a yellow print, and both wore red kerchiefs The little girls had gone to the pond after mass, displayed their finery to one another, and begun playing together. They decided to splash in the water. The younger was about to step in the puddle with her shoes on, but the older one said: 'Don't, Malasha, your mother will scold. Let you and me take off our shoes and socks'
They took off their shoes and socks, tucked up their skirts and waded through the puddle to meet each other. When the water reached Malasha’s ankles, she said: 'It’s deep, Akolusha, I'm scared.' ‘Never mind,’ said Akulina, ‘it won’t get any deeper’. As they came near to each other, Akulina said, ‘Look Malasha, don’t splash. Walk carefully.’ Just as she said that. Malasha plopped one foot in the water, splashing water right on Akulina’s smock. The smock was spattered, and water fell on Akulina’s nose and eyes. When Akulina saw the spots on the smock, she became very angry with Malasha, and ran shouting after her to hit her. Malasha, frightened at the trouble she had caused, scrambled out of the puddle to run home.
Just then Akulina’s mother happened by and saw her daughter’s spattered smock and spotted sleeves..
'Where did you get so dirty, you little wretch?’ she said.
‘Malasha spattered me on purpose.’
Aklina’s mother seized Malasha and gave her a blow on the back of her head. Malasha raised a howl down the whole street. Out came Malasha’s mother. ‘Why did you hit my child?’ she said and began abusing her neighbour. The women’s quarrel became more heated at every word. The men came out and formed a big crown in the street. Everybody was shouting, no one was listening to anyone else. They quarrelled and quarrelled, then someone pushed someone else, and a general fray was about to start when out came an old woman, Akulina’s grandmother. She walked into the middle of the crowd and began pleading with them.
‘Come, my friends, remember what day it is. You’re supposed to be rejoicing, not making trouble like this.’
They did not listen to the old woman and almost knocked her off her feet. And the old woman would never have been able to persuade them if it had not been for Akulina and Malasha.
While the women were upbraiding each other, Akulina has cleaned up her smock and gone back to the puddle in the lane. She picked up a little stone and started scraping away the earth around the puddle to let the water into the street. While she was digging, Malasha came and started helping her dig a little canal with a chip of wood. Just as the men were coming to blows, the girls’ canal released the water into the street. It ran right to the spot where the old woman was standing, still trying to calm the men. The little girls were running along opposite sides of the rivulet.
‘Catch it, Malasha, catch it!’ shouted Akulina. Malasha tried to say something but was laughing too hard to speak.
Giggling at the way the chip of wood danced along the stream, the little girls ran right into the midst of the men. The old woman caught sight of them and said to the men:
‘You should have more fear of God! You peasants are coming to blows over these little girls who’ve forgotten everything long ago, and are playing happily together, the darlings. They are wiser than you!’
The men looked at the little girls and became ashamed. And they burst out laughing and went back to their own houses.
‘And if ye become not as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven’
Tolstoi wrote that in 1885. You might not altogether sympathise with his pedagogic ideas or with the simple values of his New Testament religiosity of that period of his life, but these are not at issue here. You would not have to read many of his little stories to have a pretty good idea of what he was on about.
Tolstoi’s stuff does not conform to the simple guidelines that I suggested above. I can live with that! The important point here is that there are potentially more things to write about education, including Conductive Education, than simply 'scientific' (academic) literature, that these can go straight to the heart of the matter in ways that academic writing never can, and that they can be exceedingly influential (and fun).
And that this point has hardly been realised on Conductive Education.
More than just a Joe Friday kind of literature
'Let’s have the facts, man, just the facts.'
Sure: there are all sorts of good reasons why Conductive Education should be seeking empirical investigation (and through much more than simple comparative outcome studies). There are also all sorts of good reasons for theoretical scholarship and theoretical writing in Conductive Education. Conductive Education needs all this.
But there is something more that the proper exposition of Conductive Education screams out for by its very nature, explicit account of its values, its meaning, its spirit, its soul. You can hear this in what is said bypeople who have experienced Conductive Education, whether this experience has been directly for themselves or indirectly through their family life. Hunt through a couple of dozen good local newspaper reports and highlight what people actually say when asked about Conductive Eucation. You can hear it in what conductors say too, though relatively little of this makes it to the public domain.
It would indeed be wonderful to have a Makarenko or a Tolstoi on side to write about Conducive Education imaginatively, to convey the deeper human ’truths’ that lie beneath and beyond observable, quantifiable facts. In default of that, might I suggest that blogging permits the enthusiastic and sensitive beginner an easy, episodic way into describing what it is like to follow the conductive road to living.
Anecdotal evidence?. Damned right it is. Let us have a lot more of it.
References
Sutton, A. (1986) The practice. P. Cottam and A. Sutton (eds) Conductive Education: a system or overcoming motor disorders, London, Croom Helm. pp.27-86
Tolstoy [Tolstoi], L. N. (1960) Little girls wiser than men. The short stories of Leo Tolstoy (translated by. A. Mendel and B. Makanowitzky), NY, Bantam Books, pp. 274-276
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