"Almost every day you can read somewhere that a fundamental change is needed in schools and the education system.... With this book it is my deep wish to make a contribution to this." --M. Gl�ckler, pediatrician

How do we accompany and support the development of children and adolescents so that they can be motivated to face the upcoming challenges? What skills are needed to solve the global problems of social injustice and to deal with the consequences of the ecological-economic crisis creatively? What must the education system be like, that it prepares us as adults to be less molded to existing conditions and therefore better able to see what needs to be changed for the future? Which activities in the classroom are necessary so that initiative and entrepreneurial will can develop for the realization of new ideas? What does an age-appropriate media education look like, for achieving maturity and competence in working with information technology?

Regardless of what problem you are considering: What is needed are courage and confidence, health and joy for life. But how can school and the parental home create the conditions for these qualities to develop?

This book is a plea for radically aligning upbringing and education with the requirements of children and adolescents for healthy development--not aligning at the wrong time with performance goals coming from business and government policy. In view of the increasing life expectancy worldwide, this is an urgent requirement--because a healthy physical-emotional-spiritual maturation is the best prerequisite for a creative life in old age. That is why the annual milestones of human development are at the centre of this book and are the basis for why everyone must have the right to education in the first eighteen years of their life--regardless of which school-leaving certificate they aspire to.