Conductive living? Conductive lifestyle? Lifetime conductive education? Call it what you will, there's shockingly little in the literature. What does continuing conductive education mean for young people when school years are left behind and especially for adults as they grow older?
In late October, in Sheffield, we hope ask these questions and begin to share some answers. But first a little personal history.
When we first went to the Petö Institute, Sarah was still young but no longer a little one. When we opened Paces in 1997, her fifteenth birthday was just a few weeks away. Almost uniquely I would guess, Paces opened not like almost every centre everywhere outside Budapest for babies or early years and kindergarten groups but with four teenagers. Inevitably their journey into adulthood was one that I would travel too, as Sarah's Dad. Sarah is now in her mid-thirties, in the adult conductive education group at Paces while living independently with two housemates. Conductive education has been part of her life for over 25 years.
As Sarah has grown older in the context of a deepening crisis in adult care services in the UK and prompted by my own reading in such fields as independent living, citizenship and social pedagogy, I found myself asking what "conductive education" means in adulthood? What might "lifelong conductive education" ideally mean for a still young woman but one who is beginning to have to deal with changes in her health, changing abilities, new opportunities and with Life's inevitable downsides. What has conductive education to offer?
Late in 2016, the idea grew of bringing together in Sheffield a small group of people who were working conductively with adults in innovative ways. Funding was going to be a problem, but 'where there's a will, there's a way'. It wasn't going to be a conference or a workshop. As closely as possible, what was wanted was a conversation among friends, in a comfortable setting, with good food: in short, a Symposium.
By wonderful fortune, a posting on Conductive World Market on the 12th January this year by Ule Ossberger of KoMiT proposed an EU Erasmus+ application, for a year-long project exploring "continuing for adults what students have experienced (and highly estimated) in conductive school setting: CE accompanying the daily routine in working and in home environment". The similarity was too much of a coincidence; the mutual benefit to both the Symposium and the Erasmus+ Project were compelling. In late June, Ule announced that funding for the Erasmus+ Project had been granted. We agreed the Symposium and the first of four meetings of the Erasmus+ Project Partners would take place jointly over the last two days of October, in Sheffield.
It's still a small gathering. But maybe ... just maybe, we can start something in Sheffield that the Erasmus+ partners can explore further, that will lead to a much wider exploration, engaging more people, in an area largely neglected in conductive education literature.