All those left-over sticks…
It is the morning after Guy Fawkes night. The day has dawned bright, following twelve hours of near-solid squally rain. Not surprisingly, the harvest of sticks is not what it usually is.
Usually a walk round the streets on 6 November yields a rich harvest of the balsa-wood sticks from spent rockets. Balsa wood is not cheap and over the coming year these find a host of uses…
An allegory?
Enthusiasm for Conductive Education can be like a rocket. It roars up into the darkness, there is a huge bang and a coruscating display of crackling, sparkling light.
Then darkness again, while another expensive firework is found…
The sticks are all that remain, the sticks of furniture that around the world now litter schools, clinics even homes, mute testimonials to a past, passing joy and enthusiasm, now spent, mute and perhaps accusatory reminders of what once was and is no more.
What do others think?
Yesterday, Conductive World published a few thoughts of my own around the question of what in English are called ‘plinths’.
This attracted some interesting and challenging comments, all so far from usual suspects. I would like to hope that there might be others who have something to say, as a first step in a real and long-overdue discussion on what seems a taboo subject, the wooden-furniture fetish within Conductive Education.
I shall be responding to the thought-provoking Comments on yesterday’s posting as soon as I can. This second posting on the theme hopes to help provoke a wider range of opinions, both on what I wrote and the important points that these three Comments raise.
Decluttering… and a dilemma
Meanwhile, Susie Mallet has proposed a simple solution to those with the problem of decluttering their premises of redundant wooden furniture: give it away free to those who are just entering the CE process and baulk at the hideous cost of all this stuff. Tell people at conferences (like tomorrow’s, in Germany), advertise, otherwise announce that the stuff is there for anyone who cares to come and pick it up, and it's FREE.
Sounds a terrific idea but, like in much else in Conductive Education (and other areas of life!), a satisfactory immediate solution for individuals may act to the ultimate long-term dysbenefit of the system as a whole:
Given the high attrition rate of CE schemes, there is probably enough wooden stuff already manufactured to eliminate the need for any more to be manufactured in the forseea le future. The furniture-makers might grieve but people establishing programmes would certainly not. And how ecological such recycling would be!
On the other hand, also recycled along with the wood, would be all sorts of constructs that such furniture, along with all other human instruments, embodies within its use. Now there’s Leont’ev’s classic Activity Theory in action for you!. Put it another way, you might be unwittingly transmitting and facilitating all sorts of Mickey Mouse ideas and practices in the name of what is ‘conductive’ (the so-called ‘principles’, for example). Implementation of such ideas and practices might have inherent benefits of their own but, advanced under the ‘conductive’ rubric, they act against the proper understanding and interests of what many of us still regard as Conductive Education.
Nice idea, Susie, and I sincerely hope that you get to test it out at tomorrow’s conference.
But…
Previous item referred to here
Sutton, A. (2009) Prischen, priccsek, plinths, Conductive World, 5 November
http://www.conductive-world.info/2009/11/pritschen-priccsek-plinths.html#comments
It is the morning after Guy Fawkes night. The day has dawned bright, following twelve hours of near-solid squally rain. Not surprisingly, the harvest of sticks is not what it usually is.
Usually a walk round the streets on 6 November yields a rich harvest of the balsa-wood sticks from spent rockets. Balsa wood is not cheap and over the coming year these find a host of uses…
An allegory?
Enthusiasm for Conductive Education can be like a rocket. It roars up into the darkness, there is a huge bang and a coruscating display of crackling, sparkling light.
Then darkness again, while another expensive firework is found…
The sticks are all that remain, the sticks of furniture that around the world now litter schools, clinics even homes, mute testimonials to a past, passing joy and enthusiasm, now spent, mute and perhaps accusatory reminders of what once was and is no more.
What do others think?
Yesterday, Conductive World published a few thoughts of my own around the question of what in English are called ‘plinths’.
This attracted some interesting and challenging comments, all so far from usual suspects. I would like to hope that there might be others who have something to say, as a first step in a real and long-overdue discussion on what seems a taboo subject, the wooden-furniture fetish within Conductive Education.
I shall be responding to the thought-provoking Comments on yesterday’s posting as soon as I can. This second posting on the theme hopes to help provoke a wider range of opinions, both on what I wrote and the important points that these three Comments raise.
Decluttering… and a dilemma
Meanwhile, Susie Mallet has proposed a simple solution to those with the problem of decluttering their premises of redundant wooden furniture: give it away free to those who are just entering the CE process and baulk at the hideous cost of all this stuff. Tell people at conferences (like tomorrow’s, in Germany), advertise, otherwise announce that the stuff is there for anyone who cares to come and pick it up, and it's FREE.
Sounds a terrific idea but, like in much else in Conductive Education (and other areas of life!), a satisfactory immediate solution for individuals may act to the ultimate long-term dysbenefit of the system as a whole:
Given the high attrition rate of CE schemes, there is probably enough wooden stuff already manufactured to eliminate the need for any more to be manufactured in the forseea le future. The furniture-makers might grieve but people establishing programmes would certainly not. And how ecological such recycling would be!
On the other hand, also recycled along with the wood, would be all sorts of constructs that such furniture, along with all other human instruments, embodies within its use. Now there’s Leont’ev’s classic Activity Theory in action for you!. Put it another way, you might be unwittingly transmitting and facilitating all sorts of Mickey Mouse ideas and practices in the name of what is ‘conductive’ (the so-called ‘principles’, for example). Implementation of such ideas and practices might have inherent benefits of their own but, advanced under the ‘conductive’ rubric, they act against the proper understanding and interests of what many of us still regard as Conductive Education.
Nice idea, Susie, and I sincerely hope that you get to test it out at tomorrow’s conference.
But…
Previous item referred to here
Sutton, A. (2009) Prischen, priccsek, plinths, Conductive World, 5 November
http://www.conductive-world.info/2009/11/pritschen-priccsek-plinths.html#comments
3 comments: