In Hungary, where Conductive Education is practiced full-time in the school system, 70 percent of the people with CP walk. In the US, about 30 percent of people with CP walk.
 

    Conductive Education is a unique way of helping children with motor disorders to gain every-day living skills. Conductive Education as the name suggests, is more than physical therapy, it’s an educational approach. It opens a whole new world for the families, challenging children physically and encouraging forming them as individuals too. The theory behind Conductive Education is that the central nervous system has the capacity to form new neural connections, despite neurological damage. 

    Conductive Education was founded by a Hungarian physician, András Pető. Pető was not only a doctor, but journalist and scientist as well. He studied at various universities. During the WWII he was practicing in a war hospital, then he worked in several other hospitals in Austria. After the war, when he returned to Hungary in 1948, he started to work out the bases of a non-traditional method, called Conductive Education.
    Though things weren’t easy in the communist Hungary, the Party established a State Institute for him in 1950, and even helped him to fight the antipathy of his criticists. Even thought the new theory was accepted,  Pető always had to prove its effectiveness day by day. Establishing a public school, where they could train professional Conductors wasn't that easy either, especially since this unique profession required a college with a whole new structure. In 1968 the Institute went under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, and the Conductor's College was finally established. Dr. Pető died just before this, in 1967. After his death his former student and later associate Dr. Mária Hári took over the institute.
    Though in the beginning Conductive Education was for adults as well, during these years it became more like a school for children. Outside of the country Conductive Education still remained almost unknown. But Dr. Mária Hári opened up the doors to foreign children as well. In 1986 a BBC television documentary brought the institute to the attention of families in the UK, beeing dissastified with their regular medical services. From the fall of the Iron Curtain, Conductive Education started its global adventure and Conductors trained in Hungary are working all over in the world.
 

    Pető truly believed:  “When you do not educate the child to be independent, you educate the child to be dependent”.  Conductive Education focuses on all physical, social, intellectual, and emotional aspects of learning at the same time.