The Future of Summerhill 2 page

One such protested to me recently because I shouted sternly at a problem boy of seven who was kicking my office door. His idea was that I should smile and tolerate the noise until the child should live out his desire to bang doors. It is true that I spent a good few years of my life patiently tolerating the destructive behavior of problem children, but I did this as their psychological doctor and not as their fellow citizen.

If a young mother thinks that her child of three should be allowed to paint the front door with red ink on the ground that he is thereby expressing himself freely, she is incapable of grasping what self-regulation means.

I remember sitting with a friend in the Covent Garden Theater. During the first ballet, a child in front of us talked loudly to her father. At the end of the ballet, I found other seats. My companion said to me, “What would you do if one of your kids from Summerhill did that?”

“Tell him to shut up,” I said.

“You wouldn’t need to,” said my friend; “he just wouldn’t act that way.” And I don’t think any of them would.

Once a woman brought her girl of seven to see me. “Mr. Neill,” she said, “I have read every line you have written; and even before Daphne was born, I had decided to bring her up exactly along your lines.”

I glanced at Daphne who was standing on my grand piano with her heavy shoes on. She made a leap for the sofa and nearly went through the springs. “You see how natural she is,” said the mother. “The Neillian child!” I fear that I blushed.

It is this distinction between freedom and license that many parents cannot grasp. In the disciplined home, 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.

It must be emphasized again and again that freedom does not involve spoiling the child. If a baby of three wants to walk over the dining table, you simply tell him he must not. He must obey, that’s true. But on the other hand, you must obey him when necessary. I get out of small children’s rooms if they tell me to get out.

There has to be a certain amount of sacrifice on the part of the adult if children are to live according to their inner nature. Healthy parents come to some sort of a compromise agreement; unhealthy parents either become violent or they spoil their children by allowing them to have all the social rights.

In practice, the divergence of interests between parents and children can be mitigated, if not solved, by an honest give and take. Zoe respected my desk, and showed no compulsion to play with my typewriter and papers. In turn, I respected her nursery and playthings.

Children are very wise and soon accept social laws. They should not be exploited as they too often are. Too often a parent calls out, “Jimmy, get me a glass of water,” when the child is intent on an engrossing game.

A great amount of naughtiness is due to the wrong method of handling. Zoe when a little over a year old, went through a period of great interest in my glasses snatching them off my nose to see what they were like. I made no protest, showed no annoyance by look or tone of voice. She soon lost interest in my glasses and never touched them. No doubt, if I had sternly told her not to - or worse, spanked her little hand--her interest in my glasses would have survived, mingled with fear of me and rebellion against me.

My wife let her play with breakable ornaments. The child handled them carefully and seldom broke anything. She found things out for herself. Of course, there is a limit to self-regulation. We cannot allow a baby of six months to discover that a lighted cigarette burns painfully. It is wrong to shout in alarm in such a case, the right thing to do is to remove the danger without any fuss.

Unless a child is mentally defective, he will soon discover what interests him. Left free from excited cries and angry voices, he will be unbelievably sensible in his dealing with material of all kinds. The harassed mother standing at the gas stove, frantic about what the children are doing, is one who has never trusted her children in their activities. “Go and see what baby is doing and tell him he mustn’t” is still a phrase applying to many homes today.

When a mother writes asking me what she should do with children messing things up while she is busy cooking the dinner, I can only reply that perhaps she has brought them up that way.

One couple read some of my books and were conscience- stricken when they thought of the harm they had done in bringing up their children. They summoned the family to a conference and said, “We have brought you up all wrong. From now on, you are free to do what you like.” I forget how much they said the breakage bill came to, but I can recall that they had to summon a second conference and rescind the previous motion.

The usual argument against freedom for children is this: Life is hard, and we must train the children so that they will fit into life later on. We must therefore discipline them. If we allow them to do what they like, how will they ever be able to serve under a boss? How will they compete with others who have known discipline? How will they ever be able to exercise self-discipline?

People who protest the granting of freedom to children and use this argument do not realize that they start with an unfounded, unproved assumption--the assumption that a child will not grow or develop unless forced to do so. Yet the entire thirty-nine years of experience of Summerhill disproves this assumption Take, among one hundred others, the case of Mervyn. He attended Summerhill for ten years, between the ages of seven to seventeen. During those ten years, Mervyn never attended a single class. At age seventeen, he hardly knew how to read. Yet when Mervyn left school and decided to become an instrument maker, he quickly taught himself how to read and absorbed in a short time through self-study all the technical knowledge he needed. Through his own efforts, he made himself ready for his apprenticeship. Today, this same chap is thoroughly literate, commands a good salary, and is a leader in his community. As to self- discipline, Mervyn built a good part of his house with his own hands and he is bringing up a fine family of three boys from the fruits of his daily labors.

Similarly, each year boys and girls at Summerhill who up to then have rarely studied decide to enter college; and of their own accord, they then begin the long and tiresome grind of preparing themselves for college entrance examinations. Why do they do it?

The common assumption that good habits that have not been forced into us during early childhood can never develop in us later on in life is an assumption we have been brought up on and which we unquestioningly accept merely because the idea has never been challenged. I deny this premise.

Freedom is necessary for the child because only under freedom can he grow in his natural way--the good way. I see the results of bondage in new pupils coming from prep schools and convents. They are bundles of insincerity, with an unreal politeness and phony manners.

Their reaction to freedom is rapid and tiresome. For the first week or two, they open doors for the teachers, call me “Sir” and wash carefully. They glance at me with “respect,” which is easily recognized as fear. After a few weeks of freedom, they show what they really are. They become impudent, unmannerly, unwashed. They do all the things they have been forbidden to do in the past: they swear, they smoke, and they break things. And all the time, they have a polite and insincere expression in their eyes and in their voices.

It takes at least six months for them to lose their insincerity. After that, they also lose their deference to what they regarded as authority. In just about six months, they are natural, healthy kids who say what they think without fluster or hate. When a child comes to freedom young enough, he does not have to go through this stage of insincerity and acting. The most striking thing about Summerhill is this absolute sincerity among the pupils.

This business of being sincere in life and to life is a vital one. It is really the most vital one in the world. If you have sincerity, all other things will be added to you. Everyone realizes the value of sincerity in, say, acting. We expect sincerity from our politicians (such is the optimism of mankind), from our judges and magistrates, teachers and doctors. Yet we educate our children in such a way that they dare not be sincere.

Possibly the greatest discovery we have made in Summerhill is that a child is born a sincere creature. We set out to let children alone so that we might discover what they were like. It is the only possible way of dealing with children. The pioneer school of the future must pursue this way if it is to contribute to child knowledge and, more important, to child happiness.

The aim of life is happiness. The evil of life is all that limits or destroys happiness. Happiness always means goodness; unhappiness at its extreme limits means Jew-baiting, minority torture, or war.

But I grant that sincerity has its awkward moments. As when recently a girl of three looked at a bearded visitor and said, “I don’t think I like your face.” The visitor rose to the occasion. “But I like yours,” he said, and Mary smiled.

No, I won’t argue for freedom for children. One half-hour spent with a free child is more convincing than a book of arguments. Seeing is believing.

To give a child freedom is not easy. It means that we refuse to teach him religion, or politics, or class-consciousness. A child cannot have real freedom when he hears his father thunder against some political group, or hears his mother storm against the servant class. It is well-nigh impossible to keep children from adopting our attitude to life. The son of a butcher will not be likely to preach vegetarianism--that is, unless fear of his father’s authority drives him into opposition.

The very nature of society is inimical to freedom. Society-- the crowd--is conservative and hateful toward new thought.

Fashion typifies the crowd’s dislike of freedom. The crowd demands uniformity. In town I am a crank because I wear sandals; in my village I would be a crank if I wore a tall hat. Few men dare to depart from the correct thing.

The law in England--the law of the crowd--forbids the buying of cigarettes after eight o’clock at night. I cannot think of one individual who approves of this law. As individuals, we calmly accept crowd rulings that are stupid.

Few individuals would care to take the responsibility of hanging a murderer, or of sending a criminal to the living death we call prison. The crowd can retain such barbarities as capital punishment and our prison system, for the crowd has no conscience. The crowd cannot think it can only feel. To the crowd, the criminal is a danger; the easiest way of protection is to kill the danger or lock it up. Our obsolete criminal code is based fundamentally on fear; and our suppressive system of education is also fundamentally based on fear--fear of the new generation.

Sir Martin Conway in his delightful book, The Crowd in Peace and War, points out that the crowd likes old men. In war, it chooses old generals; in peace, it prefers old doctors. The crowd clings to the old because it fears the young.

The instinct of self-preservation in a crowd sees in the new generation a danger--the danger of having a new, rival crowd grow up - a crowd that may conceivably destroy the old crowd. In the smallest crowd of all--the family--freedom is denied to the young for the same reason. The adults cling to old values- old emotional values. There is no logical basis for a father’s prohibiting his twenty-year-old daughter from smoking. The prohibition springs from emotional sources, from conservative sources. At the back of prohibition is fear, What may she do next? The crowd is the guardian of morality. The adult fears to give freedom to the young because he fears that the young may do indeed all the things that he, the adult, has wanted to do. The eternal imposition on children of adult conceptions and values is a great sin against childhood.

To give freedom is to allow the child to live his own life. Thus expressed, it seems simple. Only our disastrous habit of teaching and molding and lecturing and coercing renders us incapable of realizing the simplicity of true freedom.

What is the child’s reaction to freedom? Children clever and children not-so clever gain something that they never had before --a something that is almost indefinable. 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. Only once in thirty-eight years at Summerhill have I seen a fight with bloody noses. We always have a small bully around--for no amount of freedom at school can completely counteract the influence of a bad home. Character acquired in the first months or years of life can be modified by freedom, but it can never be completely changed. The arch enemy of freedom is fear. If we tell children about sex, will they not become licentious? If we do not censor plays, will the people not become immoral?

The adults who fear that youth will be corrupted are those who are themselves corrupt-just as it is that dirty-minded people who demand that we should all wear two-piece bathing suits. If a man is shocked by anything, it is by the thing that he is most interested in. The prude is the Libertine without the courage to face his naked soul.

But freedom means the conquest of ignorance. A free people would need no censor of plays or of costumes. For a free people would have no interest in a shocking thing, because a free people could not be shocked. Summerhill pupils are unshockable - not because they are advanced in sin--but because they have lived out their interests in shocking things and have no more use for them as subjects of conversation or wit.

People are always saying to me, “But how will your free children ever adapt themselves to the drudgery of life?” I hope that these free children will be pioneers in abolishing the drudgery of life.

We must allow the child to be selfish - ungiving-free to follow his own childish interests through his childhood. When the child’s individual interests and his social interests clash, the individual interests should be allowed precedence. The whole idea of Summerhill is release: allowing a child to live out his natural interests.

A school should make a child’s life a game. I do not mean that the child should have a path of roses. Making it all easy for the child is fatal to the child’s character. But life itself presents so many difficulties that the artificially made difficulties, which we present to children, are unnecessary.

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. The curse of humanity is the external compulsion, whether it comes from the Pope or the state or the teacher or the parent. It is fascism in toto.

Most people demand a god; how can it be otherwise when the home is ruled by tin gods of both sexes, gods who demand perfect truth and moral behavior? Freedom means doing what you like, so long as you don’t interfere with the freedom of others. The result is self-discipline.

In our educational policy as a nation, we refuse to let live. We persuade through fear. But there is a great difference between compelling a child to cease throwing stones and compelling him to learn Latin. Throwing stones involves others; but learning Latin involves only the boy. The community has the right to restrain the antisocial boy because he is interfering with the rights of others; but the community has no right to compel a boy to learn Latin--for learning Latin is a matter for the individual. Forcing a child to learn is on a par with forcing a man to adopt a religion by act of Parliament. And it is equally foolish.

I learned Latin as a boy--rather I was given Latin books to learn from. As a boy, I could never learn the stuff because my interests were elsewhere. At the age of twenty-one, I found that I could not enter the university without Latin. In less than a year, I learned enough Latin to pass the entrance exam. Self-interest made me learn Latin.

Every child has the right to wear clothes of such a kind that it does not matter a brass farthing if they get messy or not; every child has the right to freedom of speech. I have had many years of hearing adolescent children let off all the bloodier and hells they had been forbidden to say in the nursery.

The surprising thing 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. There is a slow trend to freedom, sexual and otherwise. In my boyhood, a woman went bathing wearing stockings and a long dress. Today, women show legs and bodies. Children are getting more freedom with every generation. Today, only a few lunatics put cayenne pepper on a baby’s thumb to stop sucking. Today, only a few countries beat their children in school.

Freedom works slowly; it may take several years for a child to understand what it means. Anyone who expects quick results is an incurable optimist. And freedom works best with clever children. I should like to be able to say that, since freedom primarily touches the emotions, all kinds of children intelligent and dull--react equally to freedom. I cannot say it.

One sees the difference in the matter of lessons. Every child under freedom plays most of the time for years; but when the time comes, the bright ones will sit down and tackle the work necessary to master the subjects covered by government exams. In a little over two years, a boy or girl will cover the work that disciplined children take eight years to cover.

The orthodox teacher holds that exams will be passed only if discipline keeps the candidate’s nose to the grindstone. Our results prove that with bright pupils that is a fallacy. Under freedom, it is only the bright ones who can concentrate on intensive study, a most difficult thing to do in a community in which so many counter-attractions are going on.

I know that under discipline comparatively poor scholars pass exams, but I wonder what becomes of the passers later on in life. If all schools were free and all lessons were optional I believe that children would find their own level.

I can hear some harassed mother, busy with her cooking-- while her baby is crawling about and upsetting things - ask with irritation, “What’s all this self-regulation anyway? All very well for rich women with nurses; but for the likes of me, just words and confusion.”

Another might cry, “I’d like to, but how do I start? What books can I read on the subject?”

The answer is that there are no books, no oracles, and no authorities. All there is, is a very small minority of parents and doctors and teachers who believe in the personality and the organism we call a child, and who are determined to do nothing to warp that personality and stiffen its body by wrong interference. We are all non-authoritarian seekers after the truth about humanity. All we can offer is an account of our observations of young children brought up in freedom.

Love and Approval

The happiness and well being of children depend on the degree of love and approval we give them. We must be on the child’s side. Being on the side of the child is giving love to the child--not possessive love--not sentimental love - just behaving to the child in such a way that the child feels you love him and approve of him.

It can be done. I know scores of parents who are on the side of their children, demanding nothing in return, and therefore getting a lot. They realize that children are not little adults. When a son of ten writes home, “Dear Mommy, please send me fifty cents. Hope you are well. Love to Daddy,” the parents smile, knowing that that is what a child of ten writes if he is sincere and not afraid to express himself. The wrong type of parent sighs at such a letter, and thinks: The selfish little beast, always asking for something.

The right parents of my school never ask how their children are getting along; they see for themselves. The wrong type keeps asking me impatient questions: Can he read yet? When is he ever going to be tidy? Does she ever go to lessons?

It is all a matter of faith in children. Some have it; most haven’t it. And if you do not have this faith, the children feel it. They feel that your love cannot be very deep, or you would trust them more. When you approve of children you can talk to them about anything and everything, for approval makes many inhibitions fly away.

But the question arises. Is it possible to approve of children if you do not approve of yourself? If you are not aware of yourself, you cannot approve of yourself. In other words, the more conscious you are of yourself and your motives, the more likely you are to be an approver of yourself.

I express the earnest hope, then, that more knowledge of oneself and of child nature will help parents to keep their children free from neurosis. I repeat that parents are spoiling their children’s lives by forcing on them outdated beliefs, outdated manners, and outdated morals. They are sacrificing the child to the past. This is especially true of those parents who impose authoritative religion on their children just as it was once imposed on them.

I know well that the most difficult thing in the world is to renounce things we consider important, but it is only through renunciation that we find life, find progress, and find happiness. Parents must renounce. They must renounce hate that is disguised as authority and criticism. They must renounce the intolerance that is the outcome of fear. They must renounce old morals and mob verdicts.

Or more simply, the parent must become an individual. He must know where he really stands. It is not easy. For a man is not just himself. He is a combination of everyone he has met, and he retains many of their values. Parents impose the authority of their own parents because every man has in him his own father, every woman her own mother. It is the imposing of this rigid authority that breeds hate, and with it, problem children. It is the opposite of giving the child approval.

Many a girl has said to me, “I can’t do a thing to please Mommy. She can do everything better than I can, and she flies into a temper if I make a mistake in sewing or knitting.”

Children do not need teaching as much as they need love and understanding. They need approval and freedom to be naturally good. It is the genuinely strong and loving parent who has the most power to give children freedom to be good.

The world is suffering from too much condemnation, which is really a fancier way of saying that the world is suffering from too much hate. It is the parents’ hate that makes a child a problem, just as it is society’s hate that makes the criminal a problem. Salvation lies in love, but what makes it difficult is that no one can compel love.

The parent of the problem child must sit down and ask himself or herself these questions: Have I shown real approval of my child? Have I shown trust in him? Have I shown understanding? I am not theorizing. I know that a problem child can come to my school and become a happy, normal child. I know that the chief ingredients in the curing process are the showing of approval of trust, of understanding.

Approval is just as necessary for normal children as for problem children. The one commandment that every parent and teacher must obey is this: Thou shall be on the child’s side. The obeying of this commandment is what makes Summerhill a successful school. For we are definitely on the child’s side--and the child knows it unconsciously.

I do not say that we are a crowd of angels. There are times when we adults make a fuss. If I should be painting a door and Robert came along and threw mud on my fresh paint, I would swear at him heartily, because he has been one of us for a long time and what I say to him does not matter. But suppose Robert had just come from a hateful school and his mud slinging was his attempt to fight authority, I would join with him in his mud slinging because his salvation is more important than the door. I know that I must stay on his side while he lives out his hate in order for him to become social again. It isn’t easy. I have stood by and seen a boy treat my precious lathe badly. I knew that if I protested he would at once identify me with his stern father who always threatened to beat him if he touched his tools.

The strange thing is that you can be on the child’s side even though you sometimes swear at him. If you are or the side of the child, the child realizes it. Any minor disagreement you may have about potatoes or scratched tools does not disturb the fundamental relationship. When you treat a child without bringing in authority and morality, the child feels that you are on his side. In his previous life, authority and morality were like policemen who restricted his activities.

When a girl of eight passes me and says in passing, “Neill is a silly fool,” I know that that is just her negative way of expressing her love, of telling me that she feels at ease. Children do not so much love as they want to be loved. To every child, adult approval means love; whereas disapproval means hate. The attitude of the children to the Summerhill staff is quite like the attitude of the children to me. The children feel that the staff is on their side all the time.

I have already mentioned the sincerity of free children. This sincerity is the result of their being approved of. They have no artificial standards of behavior to live up to, no taboos to restrain them. They have no necessity to live a life that is a lie.

New pupils, coming from schools where they had to respect authority, address me as Mister. Only when they discover that I am not an authority do they drop the Mister and call me Neill. They never seek to get my personal approval--only the approval of the whole school community. But in the days when I was a village schoolmaster in Scotland, any child would gladly stay behind to help me clean up the classroom or prune a hedge outdoors, seeking-insincerely-my approval because I was the boss.

No child in Summerhill ever does anything to gain my approval, although visitors may conclude otherwise when they see some boys and girls helping me clear weeds. The motive for the work has nothing to do with me personally. In this particular instance the children were weeding because a General-Meeting law made by the pupils themselves provided that everyone over twelve was obliged to do two hours of work each week in the garden. This law was later rescinded.

In any society, however, there is a natural desire for approval. The criminal is he who has lost the desire for approval by the large part of society, or rather the criminal is he who has been forced to change the desire for approval into its opposite, the contempt for society. The criminal is always Egoist No. 1: Let me get rich quick and to hell with society. Prison sentences merely armor his egoism. A prison term merely compels the criminal to become a lone bird, brooding on himself and the horrible society that punishes him. Punishment and prison sentences cannot reform the criminal, because to him they are only a proof of society’s hate. Society eliminates the chance of his becoming social in order to gain the approval of others. This insane, inhuman prison system stands condemned because it does not touch anything of psychological value in the prisoner.

Hence I say that the first essential in any reform school is the chance of social approval. So long as boys have to salute overseers, stand in military lines, jump up if the superintendent enters the room, there is no real freedom, and therefore no chance of social approval. Homer Lane found that when a new boy came to the Little Commonwealth, he sought the approval of his fellows, generally using the technique he had used in his slum street: he boasted of his misdeeds, of his cleverness in lifting from shops, of his prowess in dodging policemen. When he found he was boasting to youths who had got over that form of seeking social approval, the newcomer was nonplussed, and he often contemptuously dismissed his new companions as sissies. Gradually his natural love of approval forced him to seek the approval of the people in his new environment. And, without any individual analysis by Lane, he adapted himself to his new companions.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 814