The American Re-EDucation Association
The American
Re-EDucation
Association
Communities are important for
children and youth, but the uses and benefits of community must be experienced
to be learned.
How Do Children Learn to Experience Community?
by
Joseph G. Murphy, Ph.D., Director
The Whitaker School, Butler, North Carolina
Keeping children and youth in or near their own community is embodied in the
spirit and philosophy of Re-EDucation. In his twelve principles of Re-Education,
Nicholas Hobbs provides guidelines for therapeutic interventions with troubled
and troubling children. The eleventh principle is: "Communities are important
for children and youth, but the uses and benefits of community must be
experienced to be learned." Hobbs’ use of the word community could mean both a
natural home community and the community the child lives in when he or she is
away from home, such as a camp community or a residential therapeutic community.
It also means a ‘community of peers’ a child can create to achieve acceptance.
Community, "to be in a relationship to others," is especially important to
adolescents. It is a developmentally appropriate sounding board in which and
from which to find one’s self outside the nuclear family. At Whitaker School
students are admitted from various and divergent home town communities from
across the state. Students can quickly reinvent their own ecosystem through the
process of being admitted to a program that is many miles from home, and into a
group that shares common bonds of indignities and possibilities. Here they learn
that they don’t have to be the same ‘troublemaker’ they were in those last few
foster family homes, or with their parents, or at the old alternative school.
Here is a new community. There is hope, silent hope, that somehow they will do
it differently this time. That hope must be given a voice.
The primary intervention is through the culture and norms of the setting and the
peer group. From it the student begins to know the community, and grow a
connection to it. But what happens to the community they left behind? How can
the Re-ED school, sometimes miles from home, keep that sense of the student’s
home community an active part of the therapeutic process, preventing further
alienation or disintegration of the natural support systems, family and friends
of the student? How do we use community-based ecological interventions to teach
the use and benefits of communities that have been too often settings for
failure and rejection?
It is essential that the experience of therapeutic community be extended to and
generalized to the home community and the child’s experience. It is necessary to
use this intervention to grow a sense of benefit by belonging. To accomplish
this we must:
A. Do all we can to insure that our residential programs and group homes are in
fact themselves therapeutic communities;
B. Re-educate families, friends, neighbors, teachers in public schools, and
caseworkers about their particular importance to each child;
C. Find communities, find extended families if needed. Make communities come to
the child and the child to his/her community as an integral primary part of each
child’s treatment;
D. Insure that the child transfers the skills learned in a therapeutic community
to the community at large by creating opportunities for positive practice and
follow up support.
If we start this process at the point of discharge planning, it’s too late. It
must happen early on, in the first weeks of residential placement if possible.
Our students time with families and supported time in their communities should
not have to be earned. We are obligated by principle to recognize the importance
of community in the lives of our children and create the experiences necessary
for the benefits of community to be learned.