A.S.NEILL 1883–1973
| I believe that to impose anything by authority is wrong. The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion—his own opinion—that it should be done. |
Neill enlisted in the British Army in 1917 and after the war his life began to take on a more positive direction. He first taught in a new experimental school (King Alfred School) and then in 1921 became assistant editor to Mrs Ensor, the founder of the New Education Fellowship. Although this association did not last long, Neill was by now confirmed in his commitment to a new type of education, very different from the traditional form in which he had been raised.
The chance to put his ideas into practice came in 1921 when he was invited to join the staff of a progressive school in Dresden, Germany. He remained there until 1923 when the school moved to an abandoned monastery near Vienna. However, difficulties arose with the local population, prompting Neill to return to England in 1924. He then opened his own school in Lyme Regis in conjunction with Frau Neustatter with whom he had worked in Germany and Austria, and whom he married in 1927. The school was named Summerhill after the name of the property.
There Neill began to implement systematically his revolutionary ideas of pupil freedom and lack of teacher authority. The school became well known and relatively successful although the enrolment in this period averaged only about forty. In 1927 it was moved to Leiston in Suffolk about 100 miles north of London, where it remains to this day as probably the best-known progressive school in the English-speaking world. On Neill’s death in 1973 it was run by his second wife, Ena, until her retirement in 1985 and since then by their daughter, Zoe.
The widespread influence of Neill’s Summerhill is attributable in no small measure to the twenty books Neill wrote between 1915 and 1972 in which he expounds clearly and forthrightly his educational ideas. The most influential of these (with sales of over two million), was Summerhill, a compilation of his writings, which was originally published in America in 1960 and then in England in 1962 with a Penguin paperback edition in 1968. In the very first chapter he states clearly his commitment to the freedom of the child: ‘we set out to make a school in which we should allow children to be themselves. In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction. The child should never be forced to learn, indeed a cardinal principle of Summerhill is that attendance at lessons is voluntary whatever the age of the child. Only learning that is voluntarily undertaken has any value, said Neill, and children will know themselves when they are ready to learn.
Children will only achieve happiness if they are free because most unhappiness is due to inner hostility created in the child by external repression. Neill was influenced by Freudian theory here and believed that because this inner hostility cannot be effectively expressed towards parents or others in authority, it is turned inwards and becomes self-hate. This then becomes expressed in anti-social behaviour and in the worst cases leads to so-called ‘problem children’. Many such children were sent to Summerhill and were cured, Neill maintains, by the application for the first time in their lives of freedom.
Happiness for Neill thus meant the state of having minimal repression. In positive terms it consists of ‘an inner feeling of well-being, a sense of balance, a feeling of being contented with life. These can only exist when one feels free.’3 Conventional education makes the mistake of exalting the intellect over the emotions with the result that children may know a lot of facts but lack inner contentment and fulfilment. Neill accordingly advocated ‘Hearts not Heads in the Schools’, the title of one of his books. ‘If the emotions are permitted to be really free, the intellect will look after itself,’ he maintained.
Traditional academic subjects were generally available at Summerhill but were not stressed. One area of this curriculum that was given more weight however was the aesthetic domain (arts, crafts, dancing, drama, etc.) which Neill saw as promoting creativity, imagination and emotional wellbeing. In particular these subjects have a therapeutic function for children with psychological problems and also give the less academically talented children the chance to excel at something.
Neill’s strong belief in freedom was linked to another cherished conviction, the innate goodness of children. ‘For over 40 years [says Neill] this belief in the goodness of the child has never wavered; it rather has become a final faith.’6 He also believed that the ‘child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.’
These convictions were a strong factor in Neill’s rejection of both moral and religious education. If a child is allowed to develop naturally he will not need the promptings and sanctions of moral or religious lessons, because his natural goodness will be allowed to manifest itself in its own way. Neill even went so far as to assert, ‘I believe that it is moral instruction that makes the child bad. I find that when I smash the moral instruction a bad boy has received, he becomes a good boy.’ Religion he found totally unnecessary: ‘free children who face life eagerly and bravely have no need to make any God at all’.
Naturally there was no place for authority-based punishment in Summerhill. ‘Punishment is always an act of hate’ thought Neill and the self-regulated child never requires it. How then was social control achieved in Summerhill? The school was run as far as possible as a democracy and most important decisions about the running of the school were voted on at the weekly general meeting where everyone (including Neill) had one vote and the majority wish prevailed. Where a child was found guilty of anti-social behaviour such as bullying, an appropriate punishment was decided by the group and it often took the form of a fine or penalty, for example handing over pocket money or missing the cinema. This approach gave the children valuable experience in running their own lives and has generally been regarded by most observers as a successful aspect of Summerhill.
How did Neill come to hold the beliefs he did and be so committed to them that he devoted his whole life to putting them into practice despite continual struggle and criticism? There is no doubt that his own unhappy schooling and university experiences were a major factor and Summerhill can be seen as a total rejection of such a traditional authoritarian approach to education. In terms of other educational theorists who may have influenced him, one thinks first of Rousseau with whom he shared so much: the belief in the natural goodness of the child, in maximum pupil freedom and in the importance of the emotions, among other things. However, Neill did not read Emile until fifty years after opening Summerhill. He also notes that he was somewhat disappointed in reading Rousseau’s Emile and remarks perceptively that ‘Emile was free but only in the set environment prescribed by his tutor. Summerhill is a set environment but it is the community that decides, not the individual tutor.’
Neill was however strongly influenced by more contemporary figures such as Freud in relation to the importance of avoiding sexual repression and guilt, Wilhelm Reich in relation to sexual freedom and the importance of self-regulation, Homer Lane in relation to self government and his idea of rewarding instead of punishing the child for anti-social behaviour (i.e. responding with love instead of hate).14 Neill knew both Reich and Lane well and devotes a chapter to them and their influence on him in his autobiography ‘Neill, Neill Orange Peel’.
Over the years, Neill has attracted an enormous amount of criticism and praise, some of it quite extreme. For example, in the book Summerhill: For and Against we find one writer saying that he would rather send his children to a brothel than to Summerhill, while another refers to it as a ‘holy place’. Some of the attacks Neill has received may be written off as conservative overreactions to what is admittedly a radical new educational experiment, but there are some areas where Neill does seem to be vulnerable to criticism.
In the first place, he lacks a systematic, considered philosophy of education, especially a coherent theory of knowledge. His ideas are based primarily on his own experiences and observations, supplemented with some study of psychological (especially psychoanalytic) theory. Certainly one’s own experiences are an important part of any educational theory but they need to be supplemented by some more systematic philosophical position on topics such as the nature of knowledge, learning, morality, human nature, society etc. Neill’s writing is very readable because of its practical focus but it consists of many unsupported assertions, exaggerations and a common tendency to generalize from individual cases (e.g. anecdotes about particular pupils) to universal educational principles. He also tends to oversimplify complex philosophical issues such as the crucial distinction between freedom and licence, where he thinks it sufficient to merely distinguish the two conceptually and give some random examples of acts he calls either freedom or licence. What is lacking is a clear principle to decide why thesecases belong to one category or the other and to help decide between conflicts of interests in such situations.
Similarly it could be argued that Neill had a rather simplistic and outdated view of moral and religious education as necessarily authoritarian and didactic. Modern educational notions of moral and religious autonomy in which children are introduced to such areas through open-ended discussion seem not to have been part of his understanding. Admittedly most of what he experienced and observed in this area would have conformed to the traditional model about which he wrote.
Another significant problem with Summerhill is the anti-intellectual bias that Neill brought to it. Is learning as unimportant as he maintains?17 Are books really ‘the least important apparatus in a school?’ Do children always know what is in their best educational interest? Can one fully utilize one’s freedom without a solid core of knowledge and understanding on the basis of which to make meaningful choices? Why does educational relevance have to be always of an immediate and practical nature? These are the sorts of questions that begin to bother one when reading Neill’s work and for all his conviction and sincerity, they suggest a major dimension of education that he fails to adequately acknowledge.
One good test of an educational theory is to ascertain the views of those who have actually experienced it in practice. Two surveys of ex-Summerhill pupils found very similar reactions. On the whole most appreciated having been to Summerhill saying that it made them more independent, better able to deal with those in authority and more tolerant. Some said it had really helped them through a difficult stage in their life and that they would not have coped nearly as well in a traditional school. However a minority said that Summerhill had not really helped them—these were generally more introverted types who said that Summerhill suited extroverts more. Interestingly, it was found that those who criticized Summerhill tended to come from the pupils who stayed there for a longer period. If there was a generally shared complaint it was to do with the down-playing of the academic side of education and the frequent lack of inspiring teachers.
It seems that Summerhill is not necessarily the answer to all our educational problems and it would not be of benefit to all types of children. However, it does have something valuable to offer for some and is useful in providing a radical alternative to the conventional educational system, which indicates what an education based on freedom of the child really means in practice. One thing that made it work as successfully as it did for so long was Neill’s charismatic personality and his genuine love and understanding of children. (This was something that was also commented upon by ex-Summerhillians.)
What then of the future of Summerhill? An OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) inspection in March 1999 was critical of certain aspects of the school and recommended a number of significant alterations. The school appealed against the inspection arguing that if the recommendations had to be adopted the school’s basic philosophy would be compromised. In March 2000 the school won its battle in the courts and can for the time being, at least, keep its basic principles intact.
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