Dennie Briggs – författare

Seven million more children will enter our classrooms in the next decade while the number of adolescents will increase by 20%. We will require three million new teachers to instruct this expanding student population. Briggs proposes a program for training children to tutor younger students, thereby freeing up teachers to devote time to students who need more individualized attention and to teach analytic and human relations skills and imaginative uses of technology.Children are capable and need opportunities to participate in teaching as well as learning. Peer teachers improve their grasp of the subject and younger children learn from those who truly speak their language. The result is a mutually beneficial system for both teachers and children.

Beginning with their first meeting in 1956 and ending with Maxwell Jones' death in 1990, A Life Well Lived follows the growth of a friendship between two key figures in social psychiatry and tracks the evolution of therapeutic communities from their experimental beginnings to the established practices that exist today. As a close friend and frequent collaborator, Briggs is able to recount in detail Jones' revolutionary work in mental hospitals, prisons, communities and schools, and offers a rare and engaging insight into the mind of one of the most important pioneers in the therapeutic community field.