"The heat of summer" by Susie Mallett, July 2010This is a lovely article and an even better video:
Thought for the day:
How can we change the fact that many parents all over the world are finding out about conductive pedagogy and upbringing only by chnace?
The two families in this video say it all. They have been given hope for the future, but only by chance.
The two families that I mentioned in my posting yesterday also only found out by chance.
One of them lives just three hundred metres from our centre and the other was already in an early- years group run by the same charity as finances the conductive centre! If they only found us by chance, then other families have an even slimmer chance of finding us.
We give out flyers to pediatricians. All the departments in our umbrella-charity have them to give to parents and we give them to local GPs, but still the word does not get around.
The two families in this video say it all. They have been given hope for the future, but only by chance.
The two families that I mentioned in my posting yesterday also only found out by chance.
One of them lives just three hundred metres from our centre and the other was already in an early- years group run by the same charity as finances the conductive centre! If they only found us by chance, then other families have an even slimmer chance of finding us.
We give out flyers to pediatricians. All the departments in our umbrella-charity have them to give to parents and we give them to local GPs, but still the word does not get around.
Where is the best place to spread the word around?
Only one person rang us this morning as a result of Saturday's newspaper article, so perhaps the press is also not the right way. One family found us, but that newspaper has a readship of at least 100,000, if not more.
What do other centres do to spread the word? How do they get in touch with parents who are searching for renewed hope?
3 comments:
You are so right, what nice reasonable people and what nice statements of CE.
My 'thought for the day' from this is a for me ever more frequent one, indeed most days it comes to me in response to some occurrence. I have been hearing just such statements from just such people now for longer than some of them (and the opposition!) have been born!). It is time to shift the paradigm.
Let us take up all the hypocritical codswallop about 'proof' and turn it round on to the activities of the opposition. Let us regard the behaviour of this huge bureau-professional panjandrum as de facto a conspiracy and deal with it forensically on this basis.
The 'system' is drawing vast sums of state resources on the basis of little or no relevant practical knowledge (expertise). This is certainly for its own benefit but of yet to be proven benefit for its 'clients' (victims) – and perhaps more easily proved dysbenefit (harm) both to children's development and to families' well being.
I would say that the people on that video are acquiescing in good spirit to a crime's being committed against them. This is not the sort of thing that the media should be letting by.
I do not know how far the crime of conspiracy stretches... but there are no lawyers on the side of CE looking at this so why should I?
If one does not start asking new questions then one should not expect to come up with new answers.
Your second link came generated the following response:
THE REQUESTED DOCUMENT COULD NOT BE FOUND ON THIS SERVER. THIS COULD BE FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS, INCLUDING:
- You followed a broken or out-of-date link
- You entered the URL incorrectly
- The file no longer exists
As for your own central question, about how to attract parents' attention: you should stop being so nice, you should raise a different kind of STINK. I can appreciate that you may not wish to do this, for all sorts of good reasons, then fair enough. For years in the UK we followed this path, good news stories about the enormous personal benefit experienced by those few who access Conductive Education. Press and politicians came, looked benignly upon it, then somehow the waters closed over us again. Now, more 20+ years later, as far as public consciousness and political team are concerned, it almost looks as if CE never had been.
What had we done wrong, one would ask. Why in our country did not CE 'take'. Looking at the positive official response just reported in Valencia, and what I hope to report soon from China, what was the extra factor in the UK that stood in the way? Then as now my finger of suspicion looks for a motive a=in eliminating awareness of CE as the next way of doing things, and it falls upon the established systems of provision (Spain and China have very under-developed systems by comparison).
Your two newspaper reports were brilliant local awareness, making it very clear the advantages offered by CE. You ought to be very pleased with them : I know that I would have been. Keep up the good work. I know that Germany is a rather different place, with rational intellectual argument perhaps of a higher status that it has in the UK. But there too, once you are sufficiently successful in your awareness campaign for the opposition to have reason to feel uneasy, then you will feel that opposition stiffen, and maybe even turn nasty,.
If that happens then I have no successful experience to advise you from though, as I have tried to imply in my comment here, maybe a quick side step and an offensive from a quite different direction might be in order – perhaps a direct and explicit challenge of what use is the present system to its clients, with what possible deleterious effects
Do keep on generating such excellent public argument for the benefits of CE. I do hope that this will help turn the oil-tanker. But, just in case it does not... what is Plan B? In the UK we did not have one.
Andrew.
Andrew,
The second link was only a direct link to the video but you obviously found it with the other one.
We are trying to create a stink.
We have been trying to do it for a year now, fighting to get the funding for the "extras" that our children need to attend mainstream school. It is not so easy, the stink gets ignored as much as the niceness does.
There are none so blind as those who can not see.
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