12 Principles of Re Education

Life is to be lived NOW, not in the past and lived in the future only as a present challenge.
Trust between child and adult is essential.
Competence makes a difference, and children and adolescents should be helped to be good at something and especially at schoolwork.
Time is an ally, working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust.
Self control can be taught and children and adolescents helped to manage their behavior without the development of psychodynamic insight.
Intelligence can be taught, Intelligence is a dynamic, evolving, and malleable capacity for making good choices in living.
Feelings should be nurtured, shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed and explored with trusted others…
The group is very important to young people and it can become a major source of instruction in growing up.
Ceremony and ritual give order, stability and confidence to troubled children and adolescents, whose lives are often in considerable disarray.
The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.
Communities are important for children and youth, but the uses and benefits of the community must be experienced to be learned.
A child should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for the morrow.
Excerpted from Hobbs, 1982, Habel, 1988. (Hobbs credits the idea of the importance of joy in the life of children to the Russian Educator and youth worker, Anton Makarenko.)ist.