At the end of the nineteenth century the decline of human society began. The social order which until then had determined the attitude of the individual began to collapse. The family, the village community, the guilds, the state itself, whether big or small, lost their real powers and therefore their significance. At first this was not much noticed and only gradually, the more this decline reached into present times, the more obvious it became to some people [.....] Today every 'civilized' country has to establish baby advice centres, marriage and family advice centres hoping to counteract the falling apart of families. Despite this social and societal fiasco children are born, in some countries even more children than 'wished-for.' They grow up without guidance or protection, at random, just in the way that comes with modern life. Does it really come as a surprise that there are more and more children who are no longer capable of being 'normal'? At the beginning of this century two or three of a hundred children needed special education. This has increased to eleven to twelve in a hundred. This means that 12 of 100, 120 of 1 000, 1 200 of 10 000 children cannot be provided with a normal upbringing in a family nor with regular education. And why should our children act 'normally' if they are put in a society the core of which is utterly and completely in ruins? Why should they wish to live as if nothing has happened on earth and things are fine anyway according to the picture painted by the newspapers and narrow-minded politicians? This world in which a child and human being has become a commodity on the employment market and a digit in the unitary state? A world in which from birth onwards everything has been set so that the developing person will find every advantage and condition imaginable apart from one: To be a human being! [.......] If these children are to receive help the first basic condition for curative education is to bring these children back into a truly social environment. This cannot be an institute or a school with dormitories and classrooms, with a dining hall and every other perceived requirements of a so-called institute, where teachers come and go and nurses and assistants and doctors have their work times and disappear again, leaving the child to his own devices. Everyone, educators, teachers, assistants, nurses, doctors can only help if they live with the children and do this whole-heartedly. If they form a family group with the children and if their own families are part and core of this family group. [.....] For this reason we have distributed the children here in Camphill into as many houses as possible where each child is 'at home.' [........] Every adult, however, who lives and works with the children and educates them needs to develop parental feelings for these children; these adults need to understand that nowadays it is necessary to create new families which are not based solely on blood relationship and heredity but on the intention to help and love these children who have actually become 'parentless.' Because although these children have a father and a mother they have separated themselves from their families because of their illnesses and aberrations and now need this new family which is created on the strength of the intention to help. To give the assistants and teachers, nurses and carers the strength required for this task a community of all those who work in these institutes and schools needs to be formed. This community, however, can only be a spiritual community which from within strives towards a goal which everyone as an individual and at the same time in community with their brothers and sisters tries to achieve. The ideological and religious unity of such a community is the basis for the new family which forms the social backbone for these children. In Camphill we have tried to solve this principal issue by making the community, which strives to stimulate the most positive strengths in the people who belong to it, the core of the social structure. Everyone who lives and works in the schools and institutes is part of it. Pursuing curative education without putting this primary social insight into practice will always result in doing things by halves; such a curative education will be helpful for individual children but it will ignore the basic problem. This basic problem is that the social order has broken down; as a result there is an alarming increase in children who need curative education because the structures within which children could hitherto grow up have disintegrated. New structures need to be created and formed so that these children find their feet again. .