Summerhill
A discussion of Summerhill follows naturally from my last blog post, which explored some ideas put forth in the book Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. De Mello basically ends that book with a glowing review of Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, which he calls a “holy book.” And he calls its author, A.S. Neill, a “great man.” De Mello said the book revolutionized the way he dealt with other people, and that he started seeing miracles everywhere after reading it. So when I finished my first reading of Awareness, back in 2013, I promptly got my hands on a copy of Summerhill, and I instantly saw what all the fuss was about.
I don’t have any children, but Summerhill is one of my all-time favorite books. One word that various people have used to describe it is “stimulating.” I also felt a great deal of hope — for humanity — when reading it. It feels like taking really good, clean medicine. It softens your heart to all children everywhere, and connects you with the pure and innocent parts of yourself (but not innocent in the way you might be thinking) that are too often exiled to the shadows. Its author, A.S. Neill, is whip-smart, hilarious, charming, bold, brave, and unflinching in his devotion to children. Indeed, he saw it as his primary job, “the bringing of happiness to some few children.” He knew that the reformation of society was beyond the scope of what he could offer. Of course, if everyone — every parent and every institution — dealt with children the way Neill did, society would most certainly reform. All of our values would change. We would know true freedom, and practice true democracy.
Erich Fromm wrote the foreword to Summerhill. He was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He wrote The Art of Loving, which will be the focus of my next blog post. “Reading [Summerhill],” Fromm says in the foreword, “I have felt greatly stimulated and encouraged.” But while he found much to admire in Neill’s work with children — namely his ability to really see them, and “not to indulge in the rationalizations and illusions by which most people live” — he contends that the Summerhill experiment can probably not be repeated in society at large, because there simply aren’t enough people like Neill to pull it off, and because most parents lack “the courage and independence to care more for their children’s happiness than for their ‘success.’”
A.S. Neill does get pretty blame-y in the book Summerhill. But in many cases it’s not the individual parents that Neill blames for their children’s behavioral or academic issues. It’s mankind in general. “There are no problem children,” he says, “only a problem humanity.”
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Summerhill the book was published in 1960 and is named after the school Summerhill, founded by Alexander Sutherland Neill in 1921. A.S. Neill was born in Forfar, Scotland, on October 17th, 1883. He was raised in an austere, Calvinist house with values of fear, guilt, and adult and divine authority, which he later repudiated. His father was the village schoolmaster; he regularly used corporal punishment to control overcrowded classrooms. At the age of 15, Neill became his father’s assistant “pupil teacher,” eventually becoming an assistant teacher in the small town of Newport-on-Tay. He adopted progressive techniques at the public school there, and abandoned the corporal punishment he’d learned from his father, for other forms of establishing discipline.
In 1908, at the age of 25, Neill enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, where he majored in English literature. He became the student paper's editor during his last year, and in his editorials, he criticized the tedium of lectures and the emphasis on tests instead of critical thinking. He began to develop his thoughts about the futility of forced education, and the axiom that all learning came from intrinsic interest. Neill graduated in 1912 and began to edit encyclopedias and similar reference books. He returned to Scotland, working as a head teacher at Gretna Green School during the first year of World War I. He moved to England in 1924 and started Summerhill in Lyme Regis, changing the location in 1927 to Leiston, in Suffolk, England, where the school still exists today.
The Summerhill school that Neill created was a true democracy. Once a week, there was a General School Meeting in which anyone was free to voice grievances, or any ideas they might have for improving how the school ran. The vote of a five-year-old student carried the same weight as the vote of a sixty-year-old Head Master. Rules were designed and modified in these meetings, and punishments for those who’d broken already established rules were decided upon. For while Neill created Summerhill as a place that prioritized freedom above all else, he made a distinction between freedom and license. A child should be free, for instance, to decide what he wants to learn, but he should not have the license to use another’s belongings without asking, or to hurt someone else, or to otherwise encroach on another person’s freedom. To quote Neill: “Throwing stones involves others. But learning Latin involves only the [child].”
When someone does throw stones or otherwise exercise undue license, a punishment naturally results. At Summerhill, everyone at the school voted on what they deemed a fitting punishment for a given transgressor. These punishments almost always related somehow to the transgression itself. For example, when two young students were caught using a ladder without first asking the ladder’s owner for permission, their peers decided they should have to climb up and down that ladder for ten minutes straight. With this process, defendants never showed signs of defiance, or of hating the authority of their community. And if they did — if they expressed their sincere belief that the punishment did not fit the crime — then the punishment was usually adjusted until the defendant was okay with it. There was an understanding among the children that if someone felt they’d been judged unfairly, then they probably had been.
In Summerhill the book, Neill writes a lot about punishment, decrying its more usual forms, which are far too often moralistic and the result of what parents perceive as disobedience. To punish a child for being disobedient, he says, is to liken oneself to God. But Neill was also immensely practical, never abandoning common sense. If a child were to hit him or kick him, he might just hit or kick that child right back — not to punish him, but to teach him that he cannot go about hurting others for his own gratification. To send children the message that it’s okay to do as they please at the expense of others, is harmful to them, and will turn them into bad citizens.
According to Neill, strict disciplinarians — those who rely on punishment as a means of controlling their child — are disapproving of themselves more than anything. Their disciplinary tactics are always projections of their self-hatred. And the result is that the child learns to not only hate the parent, but his own self, as well. Hate begets hate, and love begets love. If a child feels loved and approved of, there will be little need for discipline at all. “In the disciplined home,” Neill says, the children have no rights. In the spoiled home, they have all the rights. The proper home is one in which children and adults have equal rights. And the same applies to school.”
My mother once said that discipline is something we give to our children, not something we do to them. A quick google search of those general words informed me that one Dr. Becky Bailey said something very similar: “Discipline isn’t something you do to children, it’s something you develop within them.” I’m sure A.S. Neill would agree. But how, you might wonder, does giving children so much freedom to do as they please, instill them with self-discipline?
I think it helps to look more closely at the word “discipline.” It’s rooted in the word “disciple,” which comes from the Latin word for learner. So a person with self-discipline is essentially someone who has learned a lot about herself and from herself — someone who really knows herself. By allowing children to follow their own interests — which means we don’t try to compel their interest via rewards or punishments or any other forms of manipulation — and in fact, according to Neill, interest cannot be compelled, only attention — they discover who they really are, not who their parents, teachers, and other adult members of society want or expect them to be. And when you know yourself, which is to say you understand yourself, then you love yourself. You trust yourself. You cannot love what you fear, Neill says, and so many of us are taught, at least implicitly, on a nervous system level, to fear ourselves, or at the very least to not trust ourselves. But when we do trust and love ourselves, discipline — or self-control — naturally results, because we know it is in our own best interests to have such discipline. It’s in our own best interests, to say, move our bodies regularly. To eat nourishing food. To keep a reasonably clean house. To engage in creative activities. To care about others’ feelings. To always be learning.
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A.S. Neill would say that suspending a child from preschool is a blatant act of hatred for that child. Any form of punishment, when doled out by an authority figure or institution, is felt as hatred, because that’s what it is. And that applies to adults, too, he says. Prison sentences can’t reform the criminal because they are only proof of society’s hatred for the criminal, who then doesn’t want to gain their approval by reforming. He says that, inasmuch as we’re all basically starved for love, that we’re all potential criminals. And by “love,” I think Neill would agree with Anthony de Mello’s definition of the word, or the verb: “To see something as it really is, not as you imagine it to be, and to give it the response it deserves.”
Summerhill contains the premise that “every child has a god in him, and our attempt to mold the child will turn the god into a devil.” At Summerhill the school, freedom was the top priority. A major manifestation of this priority was the total lack of mandatory classes. Classes happened every day of the week, and students who wanted to attend them, did, but if they didn’t want to attend class ever, they didn’t have to. In his decades of running Summerhill, Neill consistently saw children learning what they needed to learn in order to thrive in their own particular way, in accordance to their natural interests and talents. He believed that learning was important, but that the modern educational system put way too much emphasis on it. Teachers in that system only dealt with the part of the child that’s above the neck, making the “emotional, vital part of the child” foreign territory. He says, “If the emotions are permitted to be really free, then the intellect will look after itself." Therefore, “Learning should come after play… Childhood is playhood.”
Society pays a hefty price for not respecting a child’s need for play. Neill says that the evils of civilization are likely the results of no child ever having enough play. Civilization is essentially anti-life, forcing children to be adults long before they reach adulthood, because the actual adults are terrified that kids won’t learn anything — won’t be successful in school and career — if they spend all their time playing. Neill would say to them that children who are granted the freedom to play as much as they want will be able to learn the necessary information in order to pass any tests required for them to pursue any career they desire, in a much shorter amount of time than children who have not been granted the same freedom and instead have been forced to learn material that didn’t interest them or that didn’t at least represent a step toward a goal that they genuinely valued. The reason that Summerhill graduates regularly got glowing reports about their industriousness at responsible jobs is that they’d lived out their self-centered fantasy stage at Summerhill. As young adults they were able to face the realities of life without any unconscious longing for the play of childhood.
And what is play, but freedom? It’s an unproved assumption, Neill says, that giving such freedom to children would come at the expense of their adjusting to the demands of life later on. It’s an unfounded claim, in other words, that a child will not grow or develop unless forced to do so. And as for how children react to freedom: “Its chief outer sign is a great increase in sincerity and charity, plus a lessening of aggression. When children are not under fear and discipline, they are not patently aggressive… [We need to] believe in the personality and the organism that we call a child, and [be] determined to do nothing to warp that personality and stiffen its body by wrong interference.” Forcing children to learn things that don’t interest them is a most common “wrong interference,” which ultimately conditions them for jobs they will not enjoy.
I think this idea merits a closer look. I’ll rephrase it: A child who’s forced to learn things that don’t interest her is a child who’s conditioned to lead a life that doesn’t interest her. Or we could circle back to self-trust and say: When a child’s instinct is to play, and she is told that this other thing — whatever it might be — is more important, she learns that her instinct is wrong and therefore can’t be trusted. She learns that what brings her pleasure is wrong.
Few things are more damaging to a human psyche than this sense of being judged for what pleases us. It happens all the time. It’s why the phrase “guilty pleasure” exists. And I’d venture that more pleasures than we’re even aware of are guilty ones. Some part of us feels bad for resting, for eating rich food, for accepting a compliment, for grinning when happy. And of course there’s our deeply messed-up relationship with what Neill describes as the greatest pleasure in the world (assuming love is involved): sex.
What Neill has to say about sex could fill at least an entire episode of this show. But I’ll condense it to a few minutes. He says that sex is repressed in this society because it is the greatest pleasure. He says that those who insist on repressing sex — on being shocked or offended by it — are the most perverse of all. In one of my favorite quotes from the book, Neill says, “The prude is the libertine without the courage to face his naked soul.” He says that adults need to be honest with children about sex, to never suggest that masturbation is wrong, to speak truthfully about how babies are made. He says that a lot of a child’s neurosis — whatever form it might take — springs from the felt sense of being lied to about sex, and somehow made to feel ashamed for their own sexual nature and for how they might have expressed it. Children are not innocent, he says, when it comes to sex. At least not in the way that adults have defined innocence. They are genuinely, in a very pure way, interested in their own bodies and in the bodies of others. By expecting them to not act on this interest — to not interact with it, as they do with everything else about the world that interests them, as that is how they learn — adults pervert the child’s sexual instincts. By insisting on the child’s supposed innocence, they steal his actual innocence.
“The surprising thing,” Neill says, “is that, with millions reared in sex hate and fear, the world is not more neurotic than it is. To me this means that natural humanity has the innate power of finally overcoming the evils that are imposed on it.”
I’ll leave you with Neill’s motto: “For heaven’s sake, let people live their own lives.”
