QUOTATION FROM ANDRÁS PETŐ UNTRACED
Trail so far leads back via Bill
Clinton to Hong Kong
Five days ago Conductive
World took up a query from Conductive Education Info,
asking about the origin of the following sentence –
Ask
me not what I can do for children with Cerebral Palsy, but ask me
what they can learn to do for themselves.
Neither enquiry, Gill's or
mine, elicited a response. Of course not.
Five websites sites were
found relaying this supposed quotation:
Now
four more websites
Today Google Alerts sent me
a new sighting of the term, referring me to a different (new?) page
on Whoopsadaisy's website:
It contained a shorter
version of the same sentence, but with slight variations in wording,
phrased a little more colloquially, and without specific mention of
cerebral palsy –
Do
not ask what can I do to help but rather what the child can do to
help himself.
So where else does this
variant occur?
Buddy Bear Trust
Dame Vera Lynn Trust
Unnamed parent in United
States
Janet Ng, Occupational
Therapist from Hong Kong
From
Hong Kong...
...to Bill Clinton's Presidential Archive
Janet Ng's quoted this
sentence as the epigraph to an article that she published in the Hong
Kong CE Journal – if my memory serves, her article opened the
first issue of volume 1 of that publication. The actual focus of the
article notwithstanding (precise physical details of the furniture
used at the Pető Institute), its opening epigraph set the
publication off to a flying start with what looks a major pedagogical
insight, attributed to András Pető (actual source unstated).
Janet's article is available
on line solely because it was included as part of an extensive bundle
of photocopies that was submitted in 1993 on behalf of the then
American Conductive Education Association by American CE-pioneer Mina
Roth-Dormfeld to President Bill Clinton, in support of the
Association's submission that Conductive Education should merit most
serious official attention in the United States
The Association's initiative
appears to have led nowhere but in the fullness of time the bundle
ended up archived in the William J. Clinton Library, part of the
Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, where it of
course remains. The archive is also on line, including Mina's
unsorted bundle and, as part of this, Janet's little article:
Janet's article has made a
long journey into posterity. Along the way no one seems to have felt
it important to note its source (or indeed the source of much else
that makes up that bundle). Without a reference to anchor it,
uncorroborated material may simply be ignored or even discounted –
or may contrarily assume the unjustified but unquestioned status of
authoritative fact.
But I am still no nearer to
knowing where this sentence came from...
Footnote
As far as the revealed items
in this archive tell, nobody else seems to have contacted Bill
Clinton about Conductive Education in his role as President.
I do not know whether other
approaches have been made to the top in the United States over the
last twenty years
Labels: History, Pető András, United States
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