A hiccough in historical time

Time for some change

For whatever reason Google Alerts has just regurgitated rather an old article. Or is it?

Presumably Google will have sent the same notification to everybody else around the world who has put an alert out for new web pages bearing the words “Conductive Education”.

Schism

The article was published in 1984 and documents the moment of what was, as far I personally experienced, the first split amongst those who wanted to establish Conductive Education outside the then Hungarian People's Republic. The split refers to the parting of the ways between, on the one hand, the Cottonists, the followers of Ester Cotton, her 'five principles' and her concept of multi- (or trans-) disciplinary Conductive Education, provided by a mix of people with other kinds of training, and on the other those who sought to derive the basis of this approach directly from its development in Budapest.

Over the subsequent twenty-six years this schism has remained yet to be satisfactorily resolved. It may of course have been so in practice  but how this has been done, with what effects and implications, has yet to enter the public record.

Earlier splits

'As far I personally experienced...'  What happened before 1983 has left very little public record indeed. Maybe there are hints somewhere in private or institutional archives, who knows? A couple of examples spring immediately to mind from the UK.

• Maybe a split, maybe just a drift, but by the time that I met mention of Conductive Education, around 1979 or 1980, if was being described by the very few who were aware of it at all outside Hungary mainly in terms of movement. The earlier insight of the American James House had slipped out of the  consideration of this orthodoxy and it took the excellent resources of the British Library to track me down a copy of the refreshing and largely unheeded article (actually an interview) from 1968 when finally I did hear of it. Contemporary public discourse on Conductive Education suggests that this gap in understanding is still to be adequately bridged even now, even though parents and conductors frequently slip into the same terms of reference as James House utilised all those years ago.

• Then another mystery that I encountered back in the early eighties. One of the earlier British establishments to have encountered Conductive Education had been Clairmont School, in Bristol, under the redoubtable Miss Ram who had set out to create a whole-school approach (educationally, the UK was a remarkably free country during those years, the seventies!). For whatever reason this involvement had ceased before my own arrival on the scene (I have been told that this had been because Miss Ram had retired but I know of no proper documentation from this time). Clairmont was (and is) a state school. The CE narrative that I came in on in the early eighties had CE very much as a matter of therapists and the voluntary sector. There is now a state sector in English Conductive Education (and something intermediate in Scotland) and divisions are blurred, so a possibility of healing this division has been in part demonstrated. It would be very interesting indeed to see more documentation of what actually this involves at the level of practice,and its implications for conductive practice.

Hári and Ákos

One further early 'split', in Hungary this one, with much, much wider implications for the whole future of Conductive Education everywhere in the world was whatever it was that happened to alienate Mária Hári and Károly Ákos from each other in Budapest in the seventies. What little I know of this came mainly from the two protagonists, and would hardly stand up in a court of law! I suppose that if nothing else emerges, then I should feel obliged to say what little I know – and what I surmise.

Suffice it here to say that it has involved the concentration of further development in Hungary chiefly of 'institutional' rather than family-based Conductive Education – particularly Conductive Education provided through the format of kindergarten or school. This is a division that strikes to the very heart of the development of Conductive Education (and of conductors) around the world.

Those were the days. It all seems so long ago, even just back to when I came into Conductive Education. The article that sparked this posting dates only from 1984, barely twenty-six years ago. Twenty-six years may seem a long time for many of the individuals living and working now in Conductive Education but is this really such a long time? A lot can happen in twenty-six years, for good or for ill, be these years in the past, or in the future.

References

Maas, R. (1968) Breakthrough in Budapest: an interview with James House. Ideas of Today, no. 16, pp.110-114

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 121-130