Towards reconstructing Conductive Education
Following Wednesday's posting on Conductive World, I wrote to Vikki and Donnie via Facebook to thank them. With Vikki's agreement I publish here, in full, the quick, intense correspondence that followed over the course of the following day (times are GMT), to see where it might lead.
Viktoria Szolnoki 10 March at 08:46
Thank you, Andrew. Hopefully some more parents will read the discussion now. I don't know how else to get to them. A lot of parents I know are raising money for some crazy therapy and it's painful to watch.
Vikki
Andrew Sutton 10 March at 09:02
More than painful, heartbreaking, especially for me when the 'therapy' in question is some strange vision of Conductive Education.
For years I have said with respect to all these supposed therapies that I don't blame the parents, I blame the established system of professions and services for leaving families so desperate and so unprepared.
With specific respect to Conductive Education I now feel, with very great regret, that a similar analysis is possible, and perhaps necessary. I don't blame parents for what they might spend their money on under the name of Conductive Education. Instead I consider the missed responsibilities and opportunities that are down to Conductive Education itself.
Andrew.
Viktoria Szolnoki 10 March at 09:47
No, the parents are not to blame. They are the victims, not the offenders. They are desperate and they would do anything, and the hoards of wolves out there take advantage of them, with the professional world kindly discussing this between themselves, and nobody helping the parent.
When it comes to Conductive Education, I think we did it so terribly wrong... I read most of the 'research' I had access to through the Cochrane Library and PubMed and ERIC. The methodology in these are so obviously flawed at every point, they look like they were hastily put together by amateurs and funded possibly by some local authorities desperately trying to prove that 'it doesn't work', so they don't have to provide it and can keep the existing system. It's beyond me to understand all the politics behind this, but we're certainly down in a deep hole.
CE went to the West all those years ago being backed up by not much more than anecdotes, through the media, making it inevitably look like a 'controversial practice'. Whoever stood up by it often made more harm than good through fatal misunderstandings and bad translations. Those were often provided by conductors, who had no understanding of anything other than their own language and culture. It's really bad luck...
Vikki
Andrew Sutton 10 March at 09:51
I am afraid that I was one of ' Whoever stood up by it...'
Andrew
Viktoria Szolnoki 10 March at 10:13
You paid CE a huge service unlike others and you weren't the one who spread the B.S. It's just unlucky that there weren't a hundred more Andrews with a lot of power to drown the voice of those 'academics' who 'can't see the forest because there's a tree in the way' – as we say in Hungary.
Vikki
Andrew Sutton 10 March at 10:33
What' 'BS'?
Andrew
Viktoria Szolnoki 10 March at 10:44
It's 'bullshit'...
Vikki
Andrew Sutton 10 March at 10:55
It's very nice of you to say that but I have certainly made grave errors, tactical and strategic. No matter now, it's history (though one may learn something from the past). What matters now is correcting old mistakes, trying to restrain those who determinedly repeat them and, most important of all, admitting that much of what has been done is WRONG and do some of the radical rethinking and painful adjustment necessary to get the show back on the road.
I agree with you about the culpability, mendacity and negative destructive force of so much 'research' (actually in many cases no more than clumsy attempts at evaluation) but I do not regard the academics, or even their paymasters, as having been Conductive Education's major problem over the last twenty of so years. Far more important have been the bewildered energy and uninformed faith of families – and the 'politics' around what they have tried to do that come inevitably when there is money and status and career to be generated (i.e. from 'the professionals', amongst whom must now also be counted conductors).
Sad to say, there is no simple narrative for either side of this equation (and few obvious 'goodies' and Baddies'). All of us are in some way trapped in how it pans out. We are all in one sense victims and at the same time we are all in a way to blame.
Step 1 towards a new future will be for some at least to admit to the problem, as essential prerequisite to solving it.
Andrew
Viktoria Szolnoki 10 March at 21:16
Well, I have to agree. As I wrote before, I just feel we're down in a deep hole, but when it comes to strategies to climb out, I'm in the dark.
Besides the damage that academics have done, I have to tell that we conductors have plenty of reasons to blame ourselves. Conductors often say incredibly silly things, which often comes down to the unfortunate fact that thoughts that make sense in Hungarian don't make sense when they're translated into English words. The language barrier continues to be a huge problem. When conductors say what they say, it is then badly misunderstood by parents, journalists, and at the end nobody knows what they're talking about. A lot of parents, who have been in the CE world for ten years or so, think CE is a day-long exercise program and is interchangeable with intensive therapy. How did this happen?
Then a lot of frustration comes from conductors saying things that are not true. Last year at the conference a conductor twenty years my senior was on the opinion that we're working towards the aim of institutionalizing the British children because that's how CE worked in Hungary. Well, we're not. She's delusional.
I have a forwarded email sent to a parent by an older conductor explaining that CE can only be done in a group, so the parent has to work on organizing a group before she can use the services of a conductor. That's just wrong. CE can, and has to be done all the time in someone's home, which never, ever means 'having to exercise the child'. A conductor around instructing the approach, routine and activity changes and how-tos are close to the best thing that can happen. And we didn't even mention all that a conductor can do at a mainstream school.
I perceive the problems about CE to be so deep-rooted and so diverse. It is frustrating because I know I can approach individual parents but the changes made feel like a drop of water in the ocean.
Vikki
I leave the last word here to Vikki. It is not of course the last word! I know that over the years I have talked with a vast number of conductors and non-conductors, providers and service users, who have view as trenchant as Vikki's – or more so. It has been very rare, however, to read these – and almost unheard of to read them in the public domain as here.
Vikki's views as expressed above focus upon particular points – and take a particular critical orientation. There are of course other points to be made – and other viewpoints to be take. It has been a continuing gripe here on Conductive World that so few people take a critical public position within and around Conductive Education. The inevitable result is that the overall public position is uncritical, there is no substantial problem, there is nothing needing to be fixed. Everything in Conductive Education is so nice, for the best of all possible worlds, and so it all goes on.
Also proposed in Conductive World has been the broad generalisation that, with the pioneer generation in the internationalisation of Conductive Education now almost gone, the cutting edge of the 'conductive movement', its practical and moral leadership, will now 'skip a generation', with substantial advance having increasingly to come from the new generation, particularly the new generation of parents and conductors.
Well,what do you have to say on this?
Reference
Sutton, A. (2010) Give me a squadron of Donnies and Vikkies, Conductive World, 19 March
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