AS Neill

I first encountered Summerhill in my high school library. I was supposed to be researching a history paper (subject now long forgotten), but was aimlessly browsing the shelves instead. I came across a book of photos by a student from the United States who had spent a couple years at Summerhill School in England.

The writer missed his days at school. I hated school and couldn’t wait to graduate. He missed the freedom and acceptance of being at school. This didn’t make any sense. I gazed at the photos and couldn’t believe the captions – going to class was optional, no one cared if students swore, there was no dress code, most kids swam in the pool without a swimsuit. While he was at school he met great friends from numerous countries and learned to play guitar; and he did just fine on college entrance exams. Why couldn’t I have gone to a school like that?

At a books sale a few years later I came across Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing by A.S. Neill, the founder of the school. Published in the United States in 1960, Summerhill’s timing was perfect to attract the attention of education reformers during the exploratory and experimental whirlwind now known as “the 60s.”
Neill instantly became, and has remained, one of my heroes (it’s a pretty small pantheon). His language is a little dated and his dedication to Freudian psychology seems quaint and occasionally overly simple. However, his total love for and single-minded commitment to children blasts forth from every page in a way I have rarely encountered elsewhere.

Neill was committed to children “as they really are,” not as adults think or hope they should be. After teaching for several years in standard schools, where children are forced to conform to the school, he opened Summerhill in the 1920s. Neill believed that childhood was when the person should be a child, not be preparing to be an adult. A happy childhood creates a human who can be a happy, productive adult. But if the natural drive to be a child was thwarted it resulted in an unhappy, hateful adult (the majority of grown ups in Neill’s view). A school’s job is to give children the room and space to be children. No coercion, no force, no punishment. A child doesn’t need rules and discipline, a child needs love, understanding and freedom.

He distinguished very clearly between “freedom” and “license.” Freedom means you can do what you want, as long as it doesn’t infringe on someone else. So a student is free not to go to lessons if they don’t want to, but they are not permitted to disrupt the lessons of other students.

Neill’s approach is so radical and so unfamiliar because it is so simple. Humans are born good. That goodness will grow and develop with the child, and be expressed as love, if it is permitted to. But if the child is confined, coerced, afflicted with arbitrary rules (which exist to make adults lives more convenient), in short, prevented from being a child, then that basic goodness is expressed as hate.

Arbitrary rules are avoided by participatory democracy. At Summerhill each person, students and staff alike, get one vote at weekly community meetings. Everyone gets to speak, and everyone else has to let them speak. By and large this system seemed to work well. Occasionally, a bully might rally enough support to create a restrictive or chaotic situation, but after seeing the results the community would take corrective actions. Once, a relatively new but charismatic and rebellious student talked enough students into voting to close the school. Neill said okay, and holed up in his office to get some writing done. The students rescinded the closure when they learned that the cook had locked up the kitchen and gone home.

One of Neill’s aphorisms is that “the cure for freedom is more freedom.” People develop responsibility by living out their desires and experiencing the consequences. Students would not have learned the dangers of following a demagogue if the staff had merely warned them against it.

Many people find it difficult to take Neill seriously. Probably because it is difficult to entertain a notion that one has never experienced. I have found it frustrating to describe the idea of Summerhill to most people because it questions so many assumptions at once. So, rather than try to describe the idea I encourage people to read the book.

Neill pursued what he thought to be the truth with determination. Though he viewed much of human society as an abject failure (he lived through two world wars, the advent of nuclear warfare, lived in a culture which came to value profit as supreme) he committed to develop and run a school in which at least a few hundred children could be educated in love and free from arbitrary authority. The school continues to exist and overcame a legal threat from the British government to shut it down in 1999.

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/