Walk with me a while down an educational by-way.
The Britain media, and politicians both national and local, are currently obsessed with parents who have sufficient interest in their children's education and upbringing as to be particular about the school their child should attend. Far from being praised or held up as exemplars to others who have less interest in their child, as one might expect, such parents are vilified. The popular term of abuse is "middle class".
The other evening I was chatting with my Dad. His Mum, my grandmother, died when she was just 50, of a massive epileptic seizure. He once told me that he witnessed the first time she had a seizure: she fell, burning her hand in an open fire. She was an amateur pianist and occasional piano teacher. She would have been about 30 years old then. That was about the time, too, that her husband, my grandad, finally left home, leaving her as a single parent of five children. The local Council, bless their cotton socks, continually wanted to take her children from her and put them in care. She fought, by all accounts, with every inch of her being. Despite the odds against them, she inculcated in her children a love for learning, education and school; all five children in turn passed the matriculation exam to go on from the village primary school to the local grammar school in the town. My grandmother is buried in an unmarked grave, somewhere in a Devon village parish churchyard. There were no funds for a headstone. Parish poor. Working class.
My Mum's Dad, my grandfather, died when I was in my final year at University. A Staffordshire miner. He died of pneumoconiosis - 'Miner's Black Lung". I remember that lovely man bent over with the pain of coughing and the straining to drag oxygen into his clogged lungs. He'd have been a couple of years younger than I am now, when he died. Sometimes, when I'm out on my bike, I remember him pedaling the couple of miles or so to work at 'the Michelin'. Working class. Proud of it. Yet I remember, too, (and this was what I was actually talking with my Dad about) the conviction in the whole family of the importance of education and me getting into a good local school. (I can tell stories of learning italic handwriting through long hours of copy-practice at night-time at home, but you don't need to know more. I am not romantic about it.) When I in turn came to matriculation, the 11+ (for which, of course, I and others practiced for hours on past papers at home), I remember the importance placed on the list of school choices. And so for my younger brother and sisters when their turn came. Education was important. Schooling was important. Choice of schools was important. And I do not remember that we were in any way unusual among neighbours and other families. How could we be? The demand for education and schooling for all children was a nineteenth century working class-driven ambition that lasted well into the mid-twentieth century at least.
When I started teaching in the 1970s, there were still in Sheffield and probably just about in every other city and town, "ESN Schools" - schools for the "educationally sub-normal". What went on there I do not know. I do know that when I came to Sheffield in 1976, I learned (for some reason that escapes me now, I had no personal or professional interest) that Sheffield had a national reputation for the quality of education in its "special schools".
Walk with me know just a little further.
I was reading tonight of a "scientifically rigorous and independent evaluation of the effectiveness of conductive education and to help guide parents, cerebral palsy care providers and policy-makers" in which
"Functional and
school readiness outcomes are assessed by independent physical
therapists and through parental questionnaires. Data from Gross Motor
Function Measure, Quality FM, Pediatric Evaluation of Disability
Inventory, Manual Ability Classification System, Communication Function
Classification System, Devereux Early Childhood Assessment and other
qualitative reports will be analyzed using various statistical methods."
What I wanted for each of my own three children as they in turn approached schooling milestones, was a good education, in a good school. What I wanted for my daughter with cerebral palsy and want, now that she is an adult beyond the reach of mainstream educators, is for all children with cerebral palsy, a good education in a good school.
It is now nearly 20 years since I first was introduced to conductive education. Twenty years in which I have yet to find a comparable system and philosophy of education. Without doubt, conductive education needs the exposure to "scientifically rigorous and independent evaluation" of its effectiveness, for the benefit of parents choosing a school for their child and for policy-makers so that they can remove the blinkers of tradition and entrenched practice.
I want a good education. I want good schooling. Let me be very simple. I am not talking about "interventions"; nor "therapy"; I am talking about "education", "schooling" - the same as for my other two children; as my family wished for me; as my Grandmother wished for her children; as I do for all children with cerebral palsy. Can we not talk about 'education', quite simply, for children with cerebral palsy? Can we not devise the necessary research into the effectiveness of conductive education as 'education', where 'education' has the same meaning as it does for other children? Would research, then, into the effectiveness of conductive education - any education - or into "conductive upbringing", be led by a paediatrician however distinguished and honoured, or undertaken by colleagues, from a University Department of Epidemiology? Would assessments be undertaken by "independent physical therapists"?
The walk is getting tiring. I am older now than when I road my bicycle around the Essex countryside as a teenager. But the other day, as I tried to summarise an especially difficult piece of writing, I realised that I was able to do so, thanks to a man who was then close to retirement, who we tormented mercilessly, as he tried to teach a bunch of 13-year old boys how to do a proper precis. Would we, should we, could we, attempt to research the effectiveness of any "education" or "upbringing" after a trial of just "one four week session" when the effects, the benefits, of education can appear a lifetime later?
Conductive education seeks to teach 'orthofunction', a term that I am not clever enough to comprehend fully, but it means something like the learned capacity for adaptability to one's environment (the important thing is to recognise this as a dynamic; not as a static set of achieved attributes; a journey, if you like, not a having-arrived). My daughter is now an adult in her mid-twenties. Quite recently, the manager of the short-stay place she goes to remarked that she and the others who attended the "Leaping the Void" adult conductive education programme at Paces were so "positive" in everything they did.
They say you can spot an independent school boy. Perhaps, in the same sort of way, exposure to conductive education, good education, good schooling, produces adults with cerebral palsy who are "positive" about themselves, able to adapt dynamically to wherever they find themselves? My point is not that independent schools are good; nor even that children with cerebral palsy can only succeed in life through conductive schooling and upbringing. My point is that (unless you take a purely mechanical, functional, test-obsessed view of education as currently in mainstream UK schools), how can you ever assess the effectiveness of education unless you do so over long periods of time? How can the effectiveness of education be assessed by paediatricians and therapists and, God help us, epidemiologists? ("The branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution and control of disease in populations".)
The traditional story of the elephant and the blind men is, I know, supposed to teach us the virtue of respecting others' opinions, views and perspectives; as each blind man felt a different part of the elephant, so each had a different, partial impression. Respect and tolerance. So my best wishes to the team from the Department of Epidemiology. But sometimes I just want to say, I don't care what you think it is - it's an elephant! It's education! Can we just do some educational research? Can we just talk about the best education in the best schools for children with cerebral palsy? And what that would look like? And how it should be achieved? For once? Sometime soon?