"Two-footedness, for example, is a coachable skill. The motor cortex and related brain areas adapt when players are encouraged to use both feet and to think in a symmetrical way."
All Conductors, I hope and expect, will find nothing exceptional or exceptionable in that statement. So writes Matthew Syed, Sports Journalist of the Year, in The Times last week, in an article about English football's youth academies. What's interesting is what he writes next.
"The head coach at one of the youth academies had a different perspective, however. "You can't coach people to use the 'wrong' foot," he said, articulating the fixed thinking that has held back every child that he had ever coached. "They either have it or they don't."
Matthew Syed describes this view (rather mildly, I thought) as "depressing". His sub-editor has no such doubts when it comes to calling it by its name: "English coaching is rotten at the core", the sub-editor headlines the article. (The Times - £)
I was minded to write something similar about the education and upbringing of children with motor disorders, though I doubt I would have dared the subject line "English education is rotten at the core". The parallel is there: I have no doubt whatsoever that when it comes to education and schooling of all our children the prevailing ethos and practice is that "they either have it or they don't". And when it comes to children with motor disorders, they are more or less widely perceived as not having "it"; that is, the view such children are, more or less, of limited educability. And before you leap to the defence of teachers, consider why we measure the success of our schools by GCSE passes at grades A-C and not, for instance, the number of children assessed as having a 'special educational need' who later, as a direct result of schoolteaching, are assessed as no longer having such a need. (One reason is that the Department for Education does not even collect such data.)
Then, on Andrew Sutton's Facebook page, I read of the death of Jerome S Bruner. Andrew kindly posted a link to a New York Times obituary "Jerome S. Bruner, Who Shaped Understanding of the Young Mind, Dies at 100". The obituary reminded me, as I should not have needed to be reminded, of what a radical, transformational, innovative approach Bruner's was and is. Andrew posted a second link, to an article in The Atlantic magazine: "An Unfinished Quest in Education - Jerome Bruner championed cognitive psychology, an idea schools still struggle to adopt."
Here are a few extracts:
I told Jerry that I agreed with almost everything he wrote about education, but I feared that most Americans didn’t.
A half century after Bruner laid out these ideas in his magnum opus, The Process of Education, they have become the accepted “best practice” in American schools. But few teachers and students actually practice them. There’s an enormous gap between the story the United States tells about education and the way it actually does happen.
Later in his career, Bruner turned to the question of culture and education: how different societies influence human growth and development. My fear is that American culture doesn’t really accept the story that Bruner told about teaching.
And there, in phrase, is the point I was going to go on to make about Andras Petö and Conductive Education: that educationalists (teachers, local education authority officers, governors of multi-academy trusts, politicians .. to name a few) still don't "really accept the story" that we as conductors and advocates of conductive education tell about motor disorder ("cerebral palsy") and the education and upbringing of children.
Conductive Education is as radical, transformative and innovative as anything proposed by Bruner, albeit we operate in a specialised field. We must not lose sight of that; we must not stop telling the Conductive Education story; we must not stop challenging the status quo (and in some cases pretending to ourselves that we are not really a challenge).
The Atlantic magazine writer ends:
But I’ll always be grateful to [Bruner] for telling [his story], over and over again, in the hope that the nation might one day learn it by heart.
In a week which saw the welcome relaunch of the Action Cerebral Palsy website, but without as far as I can find any mention of conductive education, it is more important than ever that we find ways to tell the conductive education story "over and over again, in the hope that the nation might one day learn it by heart".
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Matthew Syed writes regular stories in The Times that seem echoes from another sphere that chime with conductive education.
His 2011 book, "Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice" is well worth anyone in conductive education reading. You might be able to pick up a new paperback copy on Amazon for as little as £1.77 + £2.80 UK delivery.
Andrew Sutton has mentioned Bounce not once but three times on his blog:
In 2011: Performance - A useful way to think of CE
In 2012: Olympics - Indeed any psycho-motor skills - nothing unfamiliar here (a couple of links no longer work)
In 2015: BOUNCE Read it. Use it
And there was a post of my own:
In 2015: They Just Turned Up And Did It All Differently. I can't resist quoting this again from Matthew Syed about Team Sky: "They just turned up and did it all differently. They introduced practices that were laughed at. They were radical. They challenged every assumption. They sought marginal gains. And they were vindicated."