Read the extract from A.S. Neill´s book Summerhill and answer the questions.
“Summerhill was founded in the year 1921. The school is situated within the town of Leiston, in Suffolk, and is about one hundred miles from London. Some children come to Summerhill at the age of five years, and others, as late as fifteen. The children generally remain at the school until they are sixteen years old. We generally have about twenty-five boys and twenty girls.
The children are housed by age groups with a housemother for each group. Most pupils live two or three or four to a room; only one or two older ones have rooms for themselves. The pupils do not have to stand room inspection and no one picks up after them. They are left free. No one tells them what to wear: they put on any kind of costume they want to at any time.
When my first wife and I began the school, we had one main idea: to make the school fit the child -instead of making the child fit the school. We set out to make a school in which we should allow children freedom to be themselves. In order to do this, we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.
My view is that a child is innately wise and realistic: lf left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing. Logically, Summerhill is a place in which people who have the innate ability and wish to be scholars will be scholars; while those who are only fit to sweep the streets will sweep the streets. But we have not produced a street cleaner so far. Nor do I write this snobbishly, for I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar.
What is Summerhill like? Well for one thing, lessons are optional. Children can go to them or stay away from them - for years if they want to. The children have classes usually according to their age, but sometimes according to their interests. We have no new methods of teaching because we do not consider that teaching in itself matters very much. Whether a school has or has not a special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long division is of no importance except to those who want to learn it. And the child who wants to learn long division will learn it no matter how it is taught.
Children who come to Summerhill as kindergarteners attend lessons from the beginning of their stay; but pupils from other schools vow that they will never attend any beastly lessons again at any time. They play and cycle and get in people's way, but they fight shy of lessons. This sometimes goes on for months. The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. Our record case was a girl from a convent. She loafed for three years. The average period of recovery from lessons aversion is three months.
All the same, there is a lot of learning in Summerhill. Perhaps a group of our twelve-year-olds could not compete with a class of equal age in handwriting or spelling or fractions. But ir an examination requiring originality, our lot would beat the others hollow.
Summerhill is possibly the happiest school in the world. We have no truants and seldom a case of homesickness. We very rarely have fights -quarrels, of course, but seldom have I seen a stand-up fight like the ones we used to have as boys. I seldom hear a child cry, because children when free have much less hate to express than children who are downtrodden. Hate breeds hate, and love breeds love. Love means approving of children, and that is essential in any school. Y ou can't be on the side of children if you punish them and storm at them. Summerhill is a school in which the child knows that he is approved of.
In Summerhill, everyone has equal rights, No one is allowed to walk on my grand piano, and I am not allowed to borrow a boy's cycle without his permission. At a General School Meeting, the vote of a child of six counts for as much as my vote does.
But, says the knowing one, in practice of course the voices of the grownups count. Doesn't the child of six wait to see how you vote before he raises his hand? I wish he sometimes would, for too many of my proposals are beaten. Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.”
(i) How does Summerhill differ from the kind of school you went (go) to?
(ii) What features of the school do you like?
(iii) What features of the school don't you like?
(iv) Is there any feature that makes you doubt whether a school like this can really work?
(v) Do you think you would (benefit) have benefited from going to a similar school? If so, in what ways?
(vi) Would you send your child to a school like this? (Think out the reasons for your answer carefully.)
