Where can I look it up?
A correspondent writes –
I am searching for a published definition or explanation of 'upbringing' or anything which pays attention to the concept in some detail. Do you have any suggestion? Was it your book about Hári which had something about this notion?
I am looking for something in English that gives some clarification of the term, not necessary in CE, just in general terms.
I am looking for something in English that gives some clarification of the term, not necessary in CE, just in general terms.
What an elementary but nonetheless searching enquiry. Since my correspondent is Hungarian, and a conductor to boot, then she can perhaps answer the general matter raised in her first paragraph far better that I might. Her second paragraph suggests that she is asking something different – I think. So here is a rambling response that might help her formulate something of the answer that she requires. The only way in which I can think of structuring this is to recount it historically.
Contradiction
I first really came upon Conductive Education some thirty years ago, at one of those three-day courses run by Ester Cotton. I was immediately struck by a glaring, inherent contradiction in what she was saying (funny, no one else was and few have been since!):
On the one hand there were the most remarkable developmental transformations that she described so enthusiastically, occurring in some distant and unreachable Shangri-Lâ called 'the Institute', locked away behind Iron Curtain, in Budapest.
On the other, there were the simple nostra, the 'five principles of Conductive Education', that she was sharing on the course that weekend, which individually or together, and however well they might be executed, could patently never attain anything like the transformational effects reported from Budapest.
As a psychologist with a little background in Soviet psychology and special education, I could see something of the universe of forces that might actually be leading to the results reported from Budapest.
Only much later, as I have very slowly unpicked the tangled mix of myth and misinformation around what we call in English 'Conductive Education', did I twig what Ester Cotton had patched together to create these 'principles'. That, however, is another story. More important at that time, was to understand something of what what she had missed.
Vospitanie
Before I had really met L. S. Vygotskii and his chums, my first loves in Soviet psycho-pedagogy had been A. S. Makarenko and vospitanie. In the early nineteen-seventies I even ran a university extra-mural course around this for a couple of years, called something like 'An alternative psychology of childhood'. I don't know what the punters thought they were signing up to under that title (in the early seventies of all times!) but most of them seemed to enjoy it. A good proportion of those who came were teachers and a large slab of these two twenty-week courses was on vospitanie. In those days anyway, the sort of teachers who would surrender their own time and money to going on such a course seemed to find all this intrinsically plausible – and rather enviable!
Makarenko is a lot less 'intellectual' than Vygotskii (I'll say!) and a lot more practical. It can also be great fun to put across, the primary sources are a jolly read, and the pedagogic technology developed out of Makarenko's work, in the family, in school and in wider society, was awesome, both in its substance and in its implications.
The Russian word vospitanie is most readily translatable into English as 'upbringing', meaning what is involved in bringing up children – more specifically, bringing them up to attain your goals.
And as my correspondent well knows, the equivalent word in Hungarian is nevelés. Indeed, when she was a girl, and a teenager, and a student, and a young conductor, the equivalence between Soviet vospitanie and Hungarian nevelés was all the greater, because of the massive influence of Makarenko across the then Soviet bloc. She and her peers, and the generation before in Hungary, experienced not just 'upbringing' but a Socialist upbringing closely modelled on the Soviet model. She experienced benefits that she and her peers may sometimes now look back upon with a certain guilty nostalgia, the little blue neck-scarves, the funny salute, the stirring songs, the jolly, free holiday camps... about all of which that now remains is the 'Pioneer Railway' in the Buda Hills.
The full name of the State Institute for the Motor Disordered in Budapest said that it was nevelési – to do with upbringing. Student-conductors at the State Institute were lectured on Makarenko (by Ildikó Kozma, no less, for a time). There was even a children's town in Fót, for delinquents, directly analogous to Makarenko's own Gorky Colony (Mária Hári's best friend from her school days, was a psychologist there). With respect to Conductive Education, the only thing for the aware visitor from abroad to question was whether the Hungarian czoport (group) differed in substance from Makarenko's kollektiv and, if so, how.
Who cares?
In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, 'the West' (particularly America) had been fascinated by the motivated, achieving, well-behaved and aspirational schools and schoolchildren reported from behind the Iron Curtain – compared with the increasing educational shambles and failure experienced in school systems in the English-speaking world. Sputnik and what this said about the Arms Race brought this very much to political and therefore academic attention. If you want to read about Soviet education and Soviet upbringing, go to the second-hand bookshops and look around for the wonderful stuff still to be found there. You can find plenty there still from the sixties and seventies on vospitanie. After all, if Soviet children were really doing better, how they were being brought up by their families, their schools and society at large, provided the obvious place to look!
And there I was, at the start of the eighties, with a new-found interest in what was already called in English 'Conductive Education'. I was not the only person interested in Conductive Education at that time and I thought that the others who were would be delighted to be introduced to the much wider current of interest directed towards Soviet psycho-pedagogy. Whoops! It took me very a long time fully to wake to the fact that I had now left the world of intellectual excitement and enquiry and social relevance (and serious political concern), and tumbled down the rabbit hole into the Alice in Wonderland world of physical disability – Mária Hári's allusion, not mine.
In my naivety, using the simple samizdat tools of the day, I produced a range of leaflets and pamphlets to introduce people then working in the light of Cotton's 'principles' to some of the other things that they might consider. In the well-known words of Corporal Jones: 'They did not like it up'em'. Not entirely true: in Birmingham Philippa Cottam, Jayne Titchener and I formed the 'Birmingham Group' to explore the relevance of such ideas (soon joined by Ronni Nanton). In 1983 Ester Cotton formed an organisation, the Conductive Education Interest Group. Philippa, Jayne, Ronni I went our separate way (Sutton, 1984), setting off the chain events that a couple of years later led unwittingly to the international migration of Conductive Education.
In this, however, few have seemed to care much for matters like vospitanie, the international CE movement assuming forms and developing practices that have permitted little or no attention to upbringing, practical or academic. Most astonishingly, in both the English language and in others that have been tranlated from it (who translates from Hungarian?) Ester Cotton's 'principles' have floated buoyantly along on top of it all – you can even hear conductors recanting them!
By the way, I have absolutely no idea whatsoever about what the new generation of conductors learn about upbringing, wherever they are trained. Maybe they are all still taught about Makarenko and (as I used to teach too, about the 'post-Makarenoan' V. A Sukhomlinskii. Perhaps not. Perhaps there is nothing like vospitanie in present-day conductor education, perhaps it has been substituted by something different. No harm in that of course, as long as the new is compatible.
(It is another strange feature of the Conductive Education phenomenon that it does not publish what its front-line operatives are actually taught to believe, do and to aspire to. Perhaps those who pay for conductive practices, or agitate for the public services to do so on their behalf, really ought to know such things. If the public services ever do take this matter seriously, then they surely will want to know.)
What to read?
So, if my correspondent's question means that she is looking for academic-professional publications in English concerning 'conductive upbringing', then I am afraid that she will be pretty disappointed! The sad fact is that no widespread discussion of conductive upbringing was ever sparked off from that early attention in the UK, and upbringing as a component of Conductive Education has not been subject to either academic research or professional description. With isolated and generally ignored exceptions, whatever may happen in practice, we have had a described 'Conductive Education' free of explicit account of how to bring up children, how to inculcate values, in fact child-rearing and the role of personality-formation in general. Since education in the UK in general seems to operate with a similar gaping void at its heart then perhaps this is hardly surprising.
(The talk here has been about the UK but seems to apply to attempts to emulate Conductive Education in the rest of the English-speaking world, and in many European countries too. There is one obvious European exception: the theorised work of Yves Bawin and his colleagues in Belgium. And of course in Israel, for quite different contextual reasons, there is the work of Tsad Kadima).
So, is there nothing to read in English about conductive upbringing?. Yes a bit. My correspondent mentions Mária Hári, specifically the short collection that Gill Maguire and I edited a few years ago (Maguire and Sutton, 2004, pp.23, 26, 75-76 and 77-80). Actually, there is very little concrete here about neveles, either in the home or elsewhere. I am afraid that this tends to be the case in her writings generally: scatterings of mentions but no coherent whole. She was more of a 'pedagogy person', at least when it came to public presentation. Perhaps this has served to reinforce people's lack of explicit attention to upbringing.
The only Hungarian authors whom I know to devote a whole book to conductive upbringing in more accessible languages have been Károly and Magda Ákos (1991). Their book Dina has been ignored by the professional establishment in the West, though some parents have sworn by it. Dina was published in German, English, Russian and Chinese, though not in Hungarian. I doubt that many conductors (or any other Hungarians have even heard of it (do please correct me if I am wrong).
Few conductors write about upbringing (few conductors write!). Susie Mallett frequently introduces conductive upbringing on her blog, and that's about it.
And parents? Over the years Emma McDowell has published all sorts of items about bringing up her son conductively, and made principled statements. Had I time and the on-site help of a knowledgeable librarian I could doubtless trace several more. Norman Perrin's blog evidences conductive upbringing, and so recently does James Forliti's, but the English-language parental blogosphere so far is remarkable mainly for its convincing demonstration of how little parents who have 'done Conductive Education' have taken home with them to incorporate into the upbringing of their child – and presumably therefore how little effective attention is given to this vital matter during their experiences of Conductive Education.
As for professionals observing from 'outside', James House (1968) was a notable exception in headlining something related to this aspect of the process – though he did not express it in these terms. Perhaps this is part of my correspondent's problem in funding English-language literature on this theme. Without our own tradition of accounting this matter, there is no conceptual framework, no common vocabulary even, for us English-speakers to use. So we tend to ignore the whole, essential area and it just bobs up unexpectedly here and there, almost unnoticed, even by the writers themselves..
My correspondent asks –
I am looking for something in English that gives some clarification of the term.
My best advice for a quick and significant introduction to Soviet vospitanie is to go to Urie Bronfenbrenner's (1974) charming little book called Two Worlds of Childhood, which at one time no self-respecting Education Library in this country would be without. She will still find copies aplenty going for a song on the Internet (though most contemporary English-speaking educators, I suspect, may never have heard it. She could also try and the antikvariat or two. His book has helped me understand what I mean by the term 'upbringing'. It might help her.
Pedagogy, upbringing and effective practice
(in Conductive Education, as elsewhere)
Coincidentally (I think) another conductor correspondent recently wrote to me:
Please tell me a bit more about the enormous advantage upbringing has over pedagogy.
I answered, perhaps too briefly but it was late at night:
TIME and LOVE
For good or ill
I do not know how far this response would really stand up critical examination. I do rather suspect, however, that whatever is done in school or centre, however excellent the pedagogy provided there, it will be enormously more effective if the child returns home to a 'conductive family', and correspondingly, that a sound conductive upbringing at home is to be enormously reinforced by access to a good professional conductive service. This is self-evident to the point of being banal, I know, but where does one ever see this explicitly stated? And how often does it simply not happen in practice? And then along come the people who 'evaluate Conductive Education'...!
Footnotes
A second, extended edition of Mária Hári and conductive pedagogy will be published by Conductive Education Press around Easter. Watch out for announcements:
Former students of mine to whom I lectured over the years about V. A. Sukhomlinski will find that, thanks to the individual pioneering work of Alan Cockerill, this renounced Soviet educator is at last subject to scholarly attention and sue in the English-speaking West. (Note that he is now Sukmolinsky with a -y and that he is now being hailed as a great Ukrainian educator, with a new Ukhrainian transliteration Sukhomlyns'kyi!). For a nice, recent human touch, see Alan Cockerill's recent blog of his visit to the schol at Pavlysh to see the material roots of Sukhomlinskii's work:
http://insearchofsukhomlinsky.blogspot.com/
http://insearchofsukhomlinsky.blogspot.com/
There was actually more than one strand to Soviet vospitanie, as can be seen in Bronfenbrenner's book. Two important strands were upbringing at school and family upbringing (ideally the two were of course linked, as were all aspects of the upbringing process). If the analogy between Soviet upbringing and Hungarian nevelés of the time is a valid one, then Mária Hári's mentions were concerned largely with the former, the Ákoses' largely with the latter.
References
Ákos, K., Ákos, M. Dina: a mother practises Conductive Education (Pető System), Birmingham, Foundation for Conductive Education, and Ulm, Alabanda Verlag
Some pages of this book are available free on line through Google books:
House, J (1968) Breakthrough in Budapest. An interview with Professor James House about a method of helping severely disabled children, Ideas of Today, vol. 16, pp. 110-114
Maguire, G., Sutton, A. (2004) Mária Hári on conductive pedagogy, Birmingham, Foundation for Conductive Education
Sutton, A. (1984) Conductive Education in the Midlands, Summer 1982: progress and problems in the importation of an educational method, Educational Studies, vol. 10, no 2, pp. 121-124 ttp://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a746452781
Sorry, folks, this is a pay-only site (NB I don't get a penny of it!)
All this was written in response to a question about where to find things written about upbringing in English, specifically relatable to Conductive Education. It does not necessarily cover how to lays hands upon such things, actually to read, once one knows where to look! Nor does it seek to delineate here what such upbringing might actually be, nor how it might be implemented. Again, that's another story!
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