Here's an article I think most of us in Conductive Education will understand. Unfortunately, it's in yesterday's Sunday Times Magazine section, behind Rupert's paywall: Think and You'll Miss It by writer Hanif Kureishi.
He begins with an amusing admission that, having recently tried, he cannot skip with a rope; his 13-year old son, on the other hand, to whom he handed the rope, "did the whole thing backwards, singing a Beatles song".
Which leads him shortly to:
"My son who can skip and sing, found it difficult for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished for his inability. After the experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labelled dyslexic and dyspraxic.
"There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis. One is not alone, joining a community of others who have, it appears, a similar condition. But can the inability to do a particular thing be described as a "condition" at all. Would the fact that I can't do the tango, read music or speak Russian be considered a "condition"? Is it a failure of my development? Am I ill?"
He then considers that he was "not much impressed by the imagination and curiosity of the experts" who used an "awkward, objectifying language" and quickly began to talk "fashionably, about brains and chemicals", observing that "Biological determinism is one of psychology's ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue." ... "What I'm talking about here, I believe, is the attempted standardisation of a human being, and of a notion of achievement that is limited, prescriptive and bullying".
I doubt I can do justice to the main part of his article, but here goes. An 18-year old known to Kureishi, mentioned having been given Ritalin to help him focus, "his mind, he said, kept going off in numerous directions". Rejecting Kureishi's suggestions for alternative causes, the young man, says Kureishi asked himi if "given the choice, I wouldn't prefer to focus at will". This leads Kureishi to consider his own teenage years when "I wanted to be good at things, but, like the Ritalin boy, I fell badly behind at school, finding myself not only unable to learn but at the bottom of my class".
He then goes on to make a powerful case for the value of distraction, provided that the individual be able to "distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave ... and this can only work if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself - if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life."
"There might be more to our distractions than we realised we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not finishing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you."
It's a challenging thought.
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All the italics here are mine.
