Project Re‐ED: From demonstration project to nationwide program

Abstract

Origins. Project Re-ED (a project for the reeducation of emotionally disturbed children) had its beginnings in the early 1960s at George Peabody College for Teachers, now one of the schools of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee. There a small group of psychologists and educators-in collaboration with mental health officials of Tennessee and North Carolina, the Southern Regional Education Board, and the National Institute of Mental Health-joined together to invent a new social institution in the service of troubled and troubling children. The institution that emerged was inspired by ideas and events of the midcentury, but its character has been shaped over the years by new research and theory in child development; by economic, demographic, and social changes affecting families and children; and, most of all, by practical experience in working with thousands of disturbed children and adolescents and their families, schools, and communities. Two ideas informed early efforts to design a new approach to working with disturbed children, and these ideas have remained central to the evolving institution still known as Project Re-ED. First, the putative role of insight in psychotherapy as a source of behavior change and increased personal integration was questioned; instead, insight was regarded as an epiphenomenon, a possible consequence but not a cause of change in behavior (Hobbs, 1962). This theoretical position made congenial the notion that health or happiness or a sense of self-worth must grow out of