Method
The working method of the school emphasizes the importance of the students themselves being active. The aim is not just to help the students but also to help make them take responsibility for their own efforts. The school works on the belief, that help is an ambiguous blessing. Provided without expecting active interplay by the person seeking assistance, it may pacify people and make them dependent. Given the right way, however, it can activate them, make them feel more optimistic and increase their ability to act themselves.
The concept aims at rebuilding and strengthening the students’ self-esteem while at the same time easing their social problems. On working with the students, the primary focus is on their personal strength and abilities, and the method seeks to move people forward, not just to solve immediate problems.
Read more about this topic: Kofoeds School
Famous quotes containing the word method:
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“I do not know a method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)