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The Future of Summerhill 1 page

 

Now that I am in my seventy-sixth year, I feel that I shall not write another book about education, for I have little new to say. But what I have to say has something in my favor; I have not spent the last forty years writing down theories about children. Most of what I have written has been based on observing children, living with them. True, I have derived inspiration from Freud, Homer Lane, and others; but gradually, I have tended to drop theories when the test of reality proved them invalid.

 

It is a queer job that of an author. Like broadcasting, an author sends out some sort of message to people he does not see, people he cannot count. My public has been a special one. What might be called the official public knows me not. The British Broadcasting Company would never think of inviting me to broadcast on education. No university, my own of Edinburgh included, would ever think of offering me an honorary degree. When I lecture to Oxford and Cambridge students, no professor, no don comes to hear me. I think I am rather proud of these facts, feeling that to be acknowledged by the officials would suggest that I was out-of-date.

 

At one time, I resented the fact that The London Times would never publish any letter I sent in; but today, I feel their refusal is a compliment.

 

I am not claiming that I have gotten away from the wish for recognition; yet age brings changes-especially changes in values. Recently I lectured to seven hundred Swedes, packing a hall built for six hundred, and I had no feeling of elation or conceit. I thought I was really indifferent until I asked myself the question, “How would you have felt if the audience had consisted of ten? The answer was “damned annoyed,” so that if positive pride is lacking, negative chagrin is not.

 

Ambition dies with age. Recognition is a different matter. I do not like to read a book with the title of, say, The History of Progressive Schools when such a book ignores my work. I have never yet met anyone who was honestly indifferent to recognition.

 

There is a comical aspect about age. For years I have been trying to reach the young-young students, young teachers, young parents-seeing age as a brake on progress. Now that I am old -- one of the Old Men I have preached against so long -- I feel differently. Recently, when I talked to three hundred students in Cambridge, I felt myself the youngest person in the hall. I did. I said to them: “Why do you need an old man like me to come and tell you about freedom?” Nowadays, I do not think in terms of youth and age. I feel that years have little to do with one’s thinking. I know lads of twenty who are ninety, and men of sixty who are twenty. I am thinking in terms of freshness, enthusiasm, of lack of conservatism, of deadness, of pessimism.

 

I do not know if I have mellowed or not, I suffer fools less gladly than I used to do, am more irritated by boring conversations, and less interested in people’s personal histories. But then, I’ve had far too many imposed on me these last thirty years. I find less interest in things, and seldom want to buy anything. I haven’t looked in a clothes shop window for years. And even my beloved tool shops in Euston Road do not attract me nowadays.



 

If I have now reached the stage when children’s noise tires me more than it used to, I cannot say that age has brought impatience. I can still see a child do all the wrong things, live out all the old complexes, knowing that in good time the child will be a good citizen. Age lessens fear. But age also lessens courage. Years ago, I could easily tell a boy who threatened to jump a high window, if he did not get his own way, to go and jump. I am not so sure I could do so today.

 

A question that is often put to me is, “But isn’t Summerhill a one-man show? Could it carry on without you?” Summerhill is by no means a one-man show. In the day-by-day working of the school, my wife and the teachers are just as important as I am. It is the idea of noninterference with the growth of the child and non-pressure on the child that has made the school what it is.

 

Is Summerhill known throughout the world? Hardly. And only to a comparative handful of educators. Summerhill is best known in Scandinavia. For thirty years, we have had pupils from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark - sometimes twenty at a time. We have also had pupils from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. My books have been translated into many languages, including Japanese, Hebrew, Hindustani, and Gujarati. Summerhill has had some influence in Japan. Over thirty years ago, we had a visit from Seishi, Shimoda an outstanding educator. All his translations of my books have sold rather well; and I hear that teachers in Tokyo meet to discuss our methods. Mr. Shimoda again spent a month with us in 1958. A principal of a school in the Sudan tells me that Summerhill is of great interest to some teachers there.

 

I put down these facts about translations, visits, and correspondence without illusions. Stop a thousand people in Oxford Street and ask them what the word Summerhill conveys to them. Very likely none of them would know the name. One should cultivate a sense of humor about one’s importance or lack of it.

 

I do not think that the world will use the Summerhill method of education for a very long time-if it ever uses it. The world may find a better way. Only an empty windbag would assume that his work is the last word on the subject. The world must find a better way, for politics will not save humanity. It never has done so. Most political newspapers are bristling with hate, hate all the time. Too many are socialistic because they hate the rich instead of loving the poor.

 

How can we have happy homes with love in them when the home is a tiny corner of a homeland that shows hate socially in a hundred ways? You can see why I cannot look upon education as a matter of exams and classes and learning. The school evades the basic issue: All the Greek and math and history in the world will not help to make the home more loving, the child free from inhibitions, the parent free of neurosis.

 

The future of Summerhill itself may be of little import. But the future of the Summerhill idea is of the greatest importance to humanity. New generations must be given the chance to grow in freedom. The bestowal of freedom is the bestowal of love. And only love can save the world.


 

 

TWO

CHILD REARING

 

The Unfree Child

 

The molded, conditioned, disciplined, repressed child--the unfree child, whose name is Legion, lives in every corner of the world. He lives in our town just across the street. He sits at a dull desk in a dull school and later, he sits at a duller desk in an office or on a factory bench. He is docile, prone to obey authority, fearful of criticism, and almost fanatical in his desire to be normal, conventional, and correct. He accepts what he has been taught almost without question; and he hands down all his complexes and fears and frustrations to his children.

 

Psychologists have contended that most of the psychic damage to a child is done in the first five years of life. It is possibly nearer the truth to say that in the first five months, or in the first five weeks or perhaps, even in the first five minutes, damage can be done to a child that will last a lifetime.

 

Unfreedom begins with birth. Nay, it begins long before birth. If a repressed woman with a rigid body bears a child, who can say what effect the maternal rigidity has on the newborn baby!

 

It may be no exaggeration to say that all children in our civilization are born in a life-disapproving atmosphere. The time table feeding advocates are basically anti-pleasure. They want the child to be disciplined in feeding because non-timetable feeding suggests orgastic pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalization; the deep motive is to mold the child into a disciplined creature who will put duty before pleasure.

 

Let us consider the life of an average grammar school boy, John Smith. His parents go to church now and then, but nevertheless- insist that John go to Sunday School every single week. The parents had married quite rightly because of mutual sex attraction; they had to marry, because in their milieu one could not live sexually together unless one was respectable, that is, married. As so often happens, the sex attraction was not enough; and differences of temperament made the home a strained place, with occasional loud-voiced arguments between the parents. There were many tender moments too, but little John took them for granted, whereas the loud quarrels between his parents hit him in the solar plexus, and he became frightened and cried and got spanked for crying for nothing.

 

From the very first, he was conditioned. Timetable feeding gave him much frustration. When he was hungry, the clock said his feeding time was still an hour away. He was wrapped up in too many clothes, and wrapped too tightly. He found that he could not kick out as freely as he wanted to do. Frustration in feeding made him suck his thumb. But the family doctor said that he must not be allowed to form bad habits, and Mamma was ordered to tie up his arms in his sleeves or to put some evil-smelling substance on his fingertips. His natural functions were left alone during the diaper period. But when he began to crawl and perform on the floor, words like naughty and dirty began to float about the house, and a grim beginning was made in teaching him to be clean.

 

Before this, his hand had been taken away every time it touched his genitals; and he soon came to associate the genital prohibition with the acquired disgust about feces. Thus, years later, when he became a traveling salesman, his story repertoire consisted of a balanced number of sex and toilet jokes.

 

Much of his training was conditioned by relatives and neighbors. Mother and father were most anxious to be correct--to do the proper thing--so that when relatives or next-door neighbors came, John had to show himself as a well-trained child. He had to say Thank you when Auntie gave him a piece of chocolate; and he had to be most careful about his table manners; and especially, he had to refrain from speaking when adults were speaking.

 

His abominable Sunday clothes were a concession to neighbors. With this training in respectability went an involved system of lying--a system he was usually consciously unaware of. The lying began early in his life. He was told that God does not love naughty boys who say damn, and that the conductor would spank him if he wandered along the train corridor.

 

All his curiosity about the origins of life were met with clumsy lies, lies so effective that his curiosity about life and birth disappeared. The lies about life became combined with fears when at the age of five his mother found him having genital play with his sister of four and the girl next door. The severe spanking that followed (Father added to it when he came home from work) forever conveyed to John the lesson that sex is filthy and sinful, something one must not even think of. Poor John had to bottle up his interest in sex until he came to puberty, and then he would guffaw in the movies when some woman said she was three months pregnant.

 

Intellectually, John’s career was normal. He learned easily, and thus escaped the sneers and punishment a stupid teacher might have given him. He left school with a smattering of mostly useless knowledge and a culture that was easily satisfied with cheap tabloids, trite films, and the pulp library of crime.

 

To John, the name Colgate was associated only with toothpaste; and Beethoven and Bach were intrusive guys who got in the way when you were tuning in to Elvis Presley or the Beider becke Band.

 

John Smith’s rich cousin, Reginald Worthington, went to a private school; but his development, in essentials, was the same as that of poor John. He had the same acceptance of the second-rate in life, the same enslavement to the status quo, the same negation of love and joy.

 

Are these pictures of John and Reginald one-sided caricatures! Not exactly caricatures, yet I have not given the complete picture. I have left out the warm humanity of both, a humanity that survives the mast evil character conditioning. The Smiths and the Worthingtons of life are in the main decent, friendly folk, full of childish faith and superstitions, of childlike trust and loyalties. They and their fellows make up the John Citizen, who make the laws and demand humaneness. They are the pea pie who decree that animals must be killed humanely that plants must be properly cared for; but they break down when it comes to man’s inhumanity to man They accept a cruel, un-Christian criminal code without a thought; and they accept the killing of other men in war as a natural phenomenon.

 

John and his rich cousin agree that love and marriage laws should be stupid and unkind and hateful. They agree that there must be a law for men, and another law for women, so far as love is concerned Both demand that the girls they marry should be virgins. When asked if they are virgins, they frown and say, “A man’s different”

 

Both are staunch supporters of the patriarchal state, even if neither ever heard of the term. They have been fashioned into a product the patriarchal state finds necessary for its continued existence. Their emotions tend to be crowd emotions rather than individual feelings.

 

Long after leaving a school, which they hated as schoolboys, they will exclaim, “I was beaten at my school, and it did me a lot of good,” and then pack off their sons to the same or a similar school. In psychological terms, they accept the father without constructive rebellion against him; and so the father-authority tradition is carried on for generation after generation.

 

To complete the portrait of John Smith I ought to give a short sketch of the life of his sister, Mary--short because, by and large, her repressive environment is the same as that which stifles her brother. She has, however, special handicaps that John does not have. In a patriarchal society she is a definite inferior, and she is trained to know it. She has to do house chores when her brother reads or plays. She soon learns that when she gets a job, she will get less pay than a man gets.

 

Mary does not as a rule rebel against her inferior status in a man-made society. Man sees that she has compensations, tawdry as they mostly are. She is the focus of good manners; she is treated with deference; a man will stand in her presence if she is not seated. A man will ask her if she will graciously marry him. Mary is subtly taught that one of her chief functions is to look as lovely as possible, the result being that many more millions are spent on dress and cosmetics than are spent on books and schools.

 

In the sex sphere, Mary is as ignorant and as repressed as her brother. In a patriarchal society, the men folk have decreed that their women must be pure, virginal, and innocent. It is not Mary’s fault that she has grown up in the sincere belief that women have purer minds than men. In some almost mystical way, her men folk have made her think and feel that her function in life is only reproduction, and that sexual pleasure is man’s province.

 

Mary’s grandmother, and probably her mother, too, were not supposed to have any sex until the right man came along and aroused the sleeping beauty. Mary has got away from that phase, but not so far as we would like to believe. Her love life is ruled by fear of pregnancy, for she realizes that an illegitimate child will very likely spoil her chance of getting a man.

 

One of the big tasks of today and tomorrow is the investigation of repressed sexual energy and its relation to human sickness. Our John Smith may die of kidney trouble and Mary Smith may die of cancer; and neither will wonder whether his narrow, repressed emotional life had any connection with his illness. One-day humanity may trace all its miseries, its hates, and its diseases to its particular form of civilization that is essentially anti-life. If rigid character training makes rigid human bodies-- cramped and confined instead of being alive and pulsating--it seems logical to conclude that the same rigid deadness will prohibit the pulsation in every human organ necessary to life.

 

To sum up, my contention is that unfree education results in life that cannot be lived fully. Such an education almost entirely ignores the emotions of life; and because these emotions are dynamic, their lack of opportunity for expression must and does result in cheapness and ugliness and hatefulness. Only the head is educated. If the emotions are permitted to be really free, the intellect will look after itself.

 

The tragedy of man is that, like the dog, his character can be molded. You cannot mold the character of a cat, an animal superior to the dog. You can give a dog a bad conscience, but you cannot give a conscience to a cat. Yet most people prefer dogs because their obedience and their flattering tail wagging afford visible proof of the master’s superiority and worth.

 

The nursery training is very like the kennel training; the whipped child, like the whipped puppy, grows into an obedient, inferior adult. And as we train our dogs to suit our own purposes, so we train our children. In that kennel, the nursery, the human dogs must be clean; they must not bark too much; they must obey the whistle; they must feed when we think it convenient for them to feed.

 

I saw a hundred thousand obedient, fawning dogs wag their tails in the Templehof, Berlin, when in 1935; the great trainer Hitler whistled his commands.

 

I should like to quote a few instructions for Expectant Mothers issued some years ago by a hospital of a women’s medical college in Pennsylvania.

 

“The habit of thumb and finger sucking may be prevented by placing the infant’s arms in a cardboard tube in order that it may not be able to bend the arm at the elbow.”

 

“Private Parts. These should be kept scrupulously clean, to avoid discomfort, disease, and the formation of bad habits:’ (My italics.)

 

I blame the medical profession for much of the wrong rearing of children. Doctors are not as a rule trained in child rearing; yet for so many women, the doctor’s word is the voice of God. If he says that a child must be spanked for masturbation, the poor mother does not know that he is talking through his own sex guilt and not through his scientific knowledge of child nature. I blame the doctors for prescribing the fatuous timetable feeding, the sucking deterrents, the stupid prohibition about playing with the baby, and about giving him his own way.

 

The problem child is the child who is pressured into cleanliness and sexual repression. Adults take it for granted that a child should be taught to behave in such a way that the adults will have as quiet a life as possible. Hence the importance attached to obedience, to manners, to docility.

 

The other day, I saw a boy of three put out in the garden by his mother. His suit was spotless. He began to play with earth and slightly soiled his clothes. Mamma rushed out, smacked him, took him indoors and later sent him out weeping in new clothes. In ten minutes, he had soiled his suit, and the process was repeated. I thought of telling the woman that her son would hate her for life; and worse, hate life itself. But I realized that nothing I could say would sink in.

 

Nearly every time I go to a town or city, I see a child of three stumble and fall, and then I shrink to see the mother spank the child for falling.

 

On almost every railway trip I hear a mother say, “If you go out to that corridor again, Willie, the conductor will arrest you.”

 

Most children are reared on a tissue of lies and ignorant prohibitions.

 

Many a mother who treats her child fairly well at home will storm at him or spank him in public because she is fearful of the opinion of her neighbors. The child must from the start be forced to fit himself into our insane society.

 

Once, when I lectured in a seaside town in England I remarked, “Do you mothers realize that every time you spank your child, you show that you are hating your child?” The reaction was tremendous. The women shouted at me savagely. When later in the evening I gave my views on the question, “How can we improve the moral and religious atmosphere in the homes?” The audience hissed me with great gusto. It was a shock to me, for when I go lecturing, I lecture mostly to those who believe what I believe. But here was a working-and-middle-class audience who had never heard of child psychology. It made me realize how entrenched is the compact majority that is against freedom for children--and freedom for themselves.

 

Civilization is sick and unhappy, and I claim that the root of it all is the unfree family. Children are deadened by all the forces of reaction and hate, deadened from their cradle days. They are trained to say nay to life because their young lives are one long nay. Don’t make a noise; don’t masturbate; don’t lie; don’t steal.

 

They are taught to say yea to all that is negative in life. Respect the old; respect religion; respect the schoolmaster; respect the law of the fathers. Don’t question anything--just obey.

 

It is not virtuous to respect one who is not respectable; nor virtuous to live in legal sin with a man or woman you have ceased to love; nor virtuous to love a God you really fear.

 

The tragedy is that man, who holds his family in bondage, is, and must be, a slave himself--for in a prison the jailer also is confined. Man’s slavery is his slavery to hate: he suppresses his family, and in doing so he suppresses his own life. He has to set up courts and prisons to punish the victims of his suppression.

 

Enslaved woman must give her son to the wars that man calls defensive wars, patriotic wars, wars to save democracy, wars to end wars.

 

There is never a problem child; there are only problem parents. Perhaps it would be better to say that there is only problem humanity. That is why the atomic bomb is so sinister, for it is under the control of people who are anti-life for what person whose arms were tied in the cradle is not anti-life?

 

There is a great amount of good fellowship and love in humanity, and it is my firm belief that new generations that have not been warped in babyhood will live at peace with each other --that is, if the haters of today do not destroy the world before these new generations have time to take control.

 

The fight is an unequal one, for the haters control education, religion, the law, the armies and the vile prisons. Only a handful of educators strive to allow the good in all children to grow in freedom. The vast majority of children are being molded by anti-life supporters with their hateful system of punishments.

 

Girls in some convents still have to cover themselves when they take a bath, lest they see their own bodies. Boys are still told by parent and teacher that masturbation is a sin leading to madness and all sorts of fearful consequences. Recently, I saw a woman spank a baby of about ten months for crying when it was thirsty.

 

It is a race between the believers in deadness and the believers in life. And no man dare remain neutral: that will mean death. We must be on one side or the other. The death side gives us the problem child; the life side will give us the healthy child.

The Free Child

 

There are so few self-regulated babies in the world that any attempt to describe them must be tentative. The observed results so far suggest the beginnings of a new civilization, more profoundly changed in character than any new society promised by any kind of political party.

 

Self-regulation implies a belief in the goodness of human nature; a belief that there is not, and never was, original sin.

 

No one has ever seen a completely self-regulated child. Every child living has been molded by parents, teachers, and society. When my daughter Zoe was two, a magazine, Picture Port, published an article about her with photographs, saying that in their opinion, she of all the children of Britain had the best chance of being free. It was not entirely true, for she lived, and lives, in a school among many children who were not self-regulated. These other children had been more or less conditioned; and since character molding must lead to fear and hate, Zoe found herself in contact with some children who were anti-life.

 

She was brought up with no fear of animals. Yet one day, when I stopped the car at a farm and said, “Come on, let’s see the moo cows,” she suddenly looked afraid and said, “No, no, moo cows eat you.” A child of seven, who had not been brought up with self-regulation, had told her so. True, the fear lasted only for a week or two. A subsequent tale of tigers lurking in the bushes also had only a short life of influence.

 

It would seem that a self-regulated child is capable of overcoming the influences of conditioned children in a comparatively short time. Zoe’s acquired fears and repressed interests never lasted long; but no one can say what permanent harm, if any, these acquired fears have already wrought on her character.

 

Scores of outsiders from all over the world have said of Zoe, “Here is something quite new, a child of grace and balance and happiness, at peace with her surroundings, not at war.” It is true; she is, as near as can be in a neurotic society, the natural child who seems automatically to know the boundary between freedom and license.

 

One of the dangers of having a self-regulated child is that adults will show so much interest in her that she gets too much in the center of the picture. It is likely that in a community of self-regulated children, where all were natural and free, no single child would stand out. None would be encouraged to show off. And then, there would not be the jealousy that other children exhibit when faced with a free child who does not have their inhibitions.

 

Compared with her friend Ted, Zoe as a young child was supple and free of limb. You lifted her and her body was as relaxed as that of a kitten; but poor Ted lifted like a sack of potatoes. He could not relax; his reactions were all defensive and resisting; he was anti-life in every direction.

 

I prophesy that self-regulated children will not go through that unpleasant phase. I cannot see why they will ever need to. For if they have no feeling of being tied and restricted by parents when they are in the nursery, I cannot see any reason why rebellion against parents should arise later. Even in semi-free homes, the equality between parents and children is often so good that the rebellious striving to get free from the parents does not arise.

 

Self-regulation means the right of a baby to live freely, without outside authority in things psychic and somatic. It means that the baby feeds when it is hungry; that it becomes clean in habits only when it wants to; that it is never stormed at nor spanked; that it is always loved and protected.

 

It all sounds easy and natural and fine, yet it is astounding how many young parents, keen on the idea, manage to misunderstand it. Tommy, aged four, bangs the notes of a neighbor’s piano with a wooden mallet His fond parents look on with a triumphant smile, which means, “Isn’t self-regulation wonderful?”

 

Other parents think that they ought never to put their baby of eighteen months to bed, because that would be interfering with nature. No, baby must be allowed to stay up; when he is tired out, mother will carry him to his cot. What actually happens is that baby gets increasingly tired and cross. He cannot say that he wants to go to sleep, because he cannot verbalize his need. Usually, the weary and disappointed mother lifts him and carries him screaming to bed. Another young couple came to me rather apologetically, and asked if it would be wrong for them to put up a fireguard in a baby’s nursery. All these illustrations show that any idea, old or new, is dangerous, if not combined with common sense.

 

Only a fool in charge of young children would allow unbarred bedroom windows or an unprotected fire in the nursery. Yet, too often, young enthusiasts for self-regulation come to my school as visitors, and exclaim at our lack of freedom in locking poison in a lab closet, or our prohibition about playing on the fire escape. The whole freedom movement is marred and despised because so many advocates of freedom have not got their feet on the ground.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 847


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