In its assertion that it is a system of teaching and learning, Conductive Education sets out its distinctiveness. This simple assertion, however, finds difficulty in escaping the medical discourse and “interventions” in which motor dysfunctions, typically cerebral palsy, are first diagnosed and then “treatments” recommended.
A recent article "Lively Minds" by Lilian G Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education may offer some help in the language we use to talk about conductive education with other education colleagues and to re-assure medical professionals.
In making a distinction between Academic Goals and Intellectual Goals in the early years, Lilian Katz has this to say:
“Academic goals are those concerned with the mastery of small discrete elements of disembodied information usually related to pre-literacy skills in the arly years and practiced in drills, worksheets and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare children for the next levels of literacy and numeracy learning. The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorisation, the application of formulae rather than understanding and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she awaits.”
Whilst, on the other hand:
“Intellectual goals and their related activities …. are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (eg reasoning, predicting, analysing, questioning etc) including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasises reasoning, hypothesising, posing questions, predicting answers to the questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.”
She goes on to assert that:
“An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that …. would include, for example, [supporting] the disposition to make the best sense they can of their own experiences and environments.”
If Katz is correct, as I believe she is, then for a child with cerebral palsy, for instance, “their own experiences and environments” must include to greater or lesser degree their motor dysfunction and this in a world at best not designed for people with motor dysfunctions, at worst, arrayed against them.
Katz concludes “I suggest that early childhood curriculum and teaching methods are likely to be best when they address children’s lively minds so that they are quite frequently fully intellectually engaged.”
I return, as I often do, to a quotation from Dr Hari that to me encapsulates, for the child with motor dysfunction, both the physical and (in Katz’ meaning) the intellectual.
“…conductive education enables individuals to build up a new quality of life and a new quality of intention to achieve higher levels of coordination and some increase in coherence and power… for the everyday course of life this means that the individual is able to establish aims (intentions), to retain them, to monitor progress towards them, to resist failure and to overcome obstacles to their achievement.” (Conductive Education. Occasional Papers 2. Orthofunction – A conceptual analysis. Mária Hári.)
Could it be that in the language of “Intellectual goals” we may have part of a common educational language with which to present conductive education with those who often misunderstand it?
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If I may be allowed a brief local note: one of the distinctive achievements of Paces School is to have successfully devised a curriculum, centred on the individual child, balancing the physical, the intellectual and the academic – perhaps a better way of putting it than as we used to say, delivering the National Curriculum with Conductive Education.
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For those of an inquisitive disposition, the distinction between Academic and Social Goals proposed by Lilian Katz was followed up by Peter Grey, Research Professor at Boston College in an article in Psychology Today.
His blog, Freedom to Learn, concerns "the roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning" -
"Children come into the world with instinctive drives to educate themselves. These include the drives to play and explore. This blog is primarily about these drives and ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than suppress them." And that includes children with motor dysfunction.