If you agree there is a difference between education and schooling, you might agree that broadly speaking we might say that "education" is the teaching and learning, structured and unstructured, that goes towards upbringing; while "schooling" is the institutional arrangements we make in whatever society we might find ourselves at any point in history.
Conductive education, properly understood, is, of course, about "education". Were we free to choose, parents and conductors might well choose to work week-in, week-out, the whole year round in the joint enterprise of bringing up their children.
Instead, in the attempt to establish a significant conductive education presence, we conspire with the "Anointed"; we ape the mainstream, aspire to be part of it - and following its rhythms, shutting down in the long summer weeks as if children and their families are not also struggling then to bring up their school-age children, as if, magically, conductive education during these weeks did not matter.
One consequence is that we concern ourselves too much with such as Inspections and with Safeguarding and what the "Anointed" require of us as a School, when we might think we should be focused on children and their education - in their time, all year round.
There's much talk lately about parents setting up their own schools, funded directly by the State. For "schooling" or "education"? Can one imagine a "school" that is not a "school"? An "education" that is not "schooling"? (Professor James Tooley, writing in today's Independent can.)
When Karen Hague and I envisaged Paces and opened Paces Campus in 1997, we were quite clear that we wanted education - conductive education - at the heart of and integrated throughout an inclusive local community centre. We did not want, as so many tried, to set up a segregated special school, cut off from all around itself. In short, what we wanted was conductive education in our children's lives - "education", not "schooling".
Yesterday, I was congratulated by someone who knows about these things, on what he regarded as our singularly massive achievement for parents intent on education of children with special needs in persuading our local authority to grant the Campus a 40-year lease. I had not quite understood until then how unusual our achievement was.
And less anyone should be in any doubt, gaining non-maintained special school status for Paces School was an equally magnificent achievement by Gabor Fellner and the staff team. Of course we had to have a school. Of course we did. Might I "wish we'd never set up a school"? Of course not - it was just a jokey title to catch your eye. There was really no other sensible way to go if we were sustainably to bring conductive education to school-aged children.
But the school is not the end of our Paces' journey. "Schooling" is not the end of the upbringing journey for the children and their families - not when the summer holidays come, not when school years end. At Paces, we need to bring the Campus vision and the vision for conductive education in the lives of children and adults into a new alignment. We need to re-vision the Paces' project. That is a process on which we are now embarked, as I briefly noted in a posting on 27 February. That it will not be easy is certain. That it will lead to the next interesting stage on our conductive education journey is very much to be hoped for.
