But most of all, a Teacher/Counselor is a decent adult; educated, well trained; able to give and receive affection, to live relaxed, and to be firm; a person with private resources for the nourishment and refreshment of his own life; not an itinerant worker but a professional through and through; a person with a sense of the significance of time, of the usefulness of today and the promise of tomorrow; a person of hope, quiet confidence, and joy; one who has committed himself to children and to the proposition that children who are disturbed can be helped by the process of reeducation."

-Hobbs, The Troubled and Troubling Child

 Apart from the emphasis on working with the total ecological system, perhaps the one thing that most sharply differentiates a Re-Ed school from many other residential programs for children is the fullness and purposefulness of each day in the life of a child.

The constant challenge to staff is to design a daily program so engaging, so varied and new yet orderly and stable, so exuberant, so filled with mystery, exploration, and discovery, so physical, so meshed with the growth of the child's mind, so rich in human interchange, so responsive to mood, so tranquil and safe as occasion demands, so filled with success in matters small and large, so unconcerned with failure, so appreciative of individuality and of common purpose, so evocative of a sense of community, so finely modulated to the needs of a particular child and a particular moment, so joyous, so aware, so filled with good talk, so fatiguing, so rewarding to children and teacher-counselors alike-in sum, so resoundingly normal-that the disturbed child finds himself immediately committed to a new way of living at once more satisfying to himself and more satisfactory to the people in his life.

Indeed, when a day's program is well planned and executed, when things are going well with the group, it is exceedingly difficult for a disturbed child to behave in a manner that earlier caused him to be so described. Such a day is by no means easy to make happen. It takes good people, extensive resources, and careful planning.

-Hobbs, The Troubled and Troubling Child, pp. 88 & 89.

 Life is always highly problematic and what you become will rest in no small measure on the kinds of problem situations you get yourself into and have to work yourself out of. It is exceedingly difficult for a person to take thought and alter the quality and character and direction of his life. However, he can choose the direction he would like his life to take and then put himself deliberately in situations that will require the evolution of himself toward the kind of person he would like to become.

It is deep in the nature of man to make problems for himself. Man has often been called the problem-solver but he is even more the problem maker. Every noble achievement of men- in government, art, architecture, literature, and, above all, in science- represents a new synthesis of the human experience, deepening our understanding and enriching our spirit. But each such noble achievement creates new problems, often of unexpected dimension, and man moves eagerly on to face these new perplexities and to impose his order upon them. And so it will be, world without end.

To know a person, it is useful to know what he has done, another way of defining what problems he has solved. It is even more informative, however, to know what he is working on now. For these will define the growing edge of his being.

We sometimes think of the well-adjusted person as having very few problems, while in fact, just the opposite is true. When a person is ill or injured or crushed with grief or deeply frightened, the range of concerns become sharply constricted; his problems diminish in scope and quality and complexity.

By contrast, the healthy person, the healthy in body and spirit, is a person faced with many difficulties. He has a lot of problems, many of which he has deliberately chosen with the sure knowledge that in working toward their solution, he will become more the person he would like to be.

Part of the art of choosing difficulties is to select those that are indeed just manageable. If the difficulties chosen are too easy life is boring; if they're too hard, life is self defeating.

The trick is to move oneself in the direction of what he would like to become at a level of difficulty close to the edge of his competence. When one achieves this fine tuning of his life, he will know zest and joy and deep fulfillment.

The excerpt above is from a high school commencement address delivered by Nick Hobbs. This address is also thought to be the original source of his own principle of the "J.M.D." or the principle of "Just Manageable Difficulties."