To the eye of this parent and English-trained teacher, the Petö Institute could be a challenging environment. One of the more curious features of conductive education as practised at Kútvölgyi út was the responsibility taken by Conductors for the equipment they worked with and the rooms they worked in, including responsibility at the end of one working day for cleaning and setting up their room for the next day's session.
As I came to understand Conductive Education, or Conductive Movement Pedagogy to use the term Judit Szathmary prefers, thus neatly emphasising the inherent dynamic, I came to understand that the odd equipment and the very spaces themselves in which Conductors worked with the children had an inherent value. To risk a flight of fancy, if the work with the children was the music the Conductors played, the equipment and the spaces were their instruments, their tools.
The traditional English saying "It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools" does not mean that the quality of the tools doesn't matter at all, that only the craftsman's skills do. It means that part of being an expert is producing excellent results from excellent tools and having the experience and skills to maintain them. Perhaps, if you will allow a second flight of fancy in one blogpost, the Conductor in taking care of their equipment and spaces at the end of each day and before the next, were maintaining these as attentively as a violinist does their violin?
In the often-quoted Principles of Conductive Education, I don't recall reading anything specific about one essence of conductive education being in the dynamic of conductor-child in relation to the equipment and spaces (though we read about the importance of the group, for instance).
For this British-trained teacher, responsibility for cleaning and tidying the classroom was something I left to others. I wonder how many Conductors working now in the UK continue that Petö Institute practice of responsibility for their own equipment and spaces rather than having adopted the hierarchical, class-ridden English system of leaving it all to cleaners?
Or perhaps I imagined it all?