Norman Perrin asked on his “Lens of possibility” posting yesterday:
“If there were no schools, where and how would you deliver conductive education?”
My reaction on reading the questions was “Wow! This could be the solution to the problem”. I decided to put the resulting list of suggestions that I wrote in my notebook on to my blog in an attempt to answer Norman’s question.
From my notebook:
“It would be wonderful if conductive education became conductive upbringing and started to be delivered everywhere and anywhere, excepting in schools. It could be delivered at the cinema, on the bus, at a party, in the playground, at home, in front of the television or computer, in the bathroom, in the dinning-room, in a restaurant, in a pub, in the garden, on the street, in the swimming pool, in a car, at church, at the chess club, on holiday, at work or at play...”
I could have listed more and more but I thatexpect it was time to get out of the S-Bahn train and continue my journey by bike, otherwise I would have done.
Later, on reading back through my notes, I thought at first: "This is all a bit too naïve, not really what Norman was asking for". But no, I think it it really is essential to the whole problem. We really do need to be looking at life as a whole and not only as the part of the week and the year that children spent in school.
Andrew Sutton defines conducere for us today:
“to bring together, collect, assemble, to unite, join, to connect, to cause to contract or close up”.
That is what is needed here. We need to unite the whole life of our clients, make it all conductive, not just the few hours spent in school. Connect the different people the clients work with in their day, bring their lives together as a conductive whole.
Notes
Norman Perrin
Andrew Sutton
4 comments:
I always tell my students that the conductor in my perception is an environmental architect who at his best designs a learning process which connects and coordinates the different environments, persons, occupations and volition which built the daily life of the individual. In that respect, school is only one part of a whole, that unfortunately in many case became 'a garage for 'fixing' children'.
Susie, what a wonderfully roomy bus. No wonder you get to take your bike on board. It can be done,within A properly planned transport system within an integrated, caring and thoughtful system of planning.
And Rony, I rather like your notion of conductors as architects, or town-planners (and one could probably also elaborate on patent examples of the disastrous results when architecture and town-planning go wrong!)
I am not so sure, however, about schools as garages or repair shops. I suspect that they might think of themselves in that way, they often seem to act as if they do, but who would take something to be repaired to places with such a record of getting things working!
Andrew.
What I meant was, that there are still services (and parents) that are conceptualized according to the 'fixing model': I have a child with a problem that I can't resolve, you are the experts, fix him/her, and return them to me as new. In the same way, there are still services which sees themselves as 'the' experts who can fix children with parents involvement. With the increasing understanding that family centered service is the best practice, we should expect to see less and less the first phenomena, Yet, the more we provide CE in the community, at home, at playgrounds, in apartments, throughout environment and throughout life, the more we shall be able to provide conductive upbringing at its best. Again, school is an important part in the puzzle, depending on its orientation as a closed or open system, not of less importance are all other environments and contexts of the individual daily living routine. The more it happens in an ecological manner, the less it will rest solely as the responsibility of schools.
Thanks to Rony for the prompt to this post. Very interesting. And the comments. I will maybe respond further when the present roundabout stops spinning and I can gather scattered thoughts.
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