The Future of Summerhill 4 page

The fact is that adults are possessive about things of value and children are not. Any living together between children and adults must therefore result in conflict over material things. At Summerhill, the children will turn up the furnace five minutes before going up to bed. They will generously heap it with coals--for coals to them are only black rocks while to me they mean a bill of one thousand dollars a year. The children will leave electric lights on because they do not associate light with electricity bills.

Furniture to a child is practically nonexistent. So at Summerhill we buy old car seats and old bus seats. And in a month or two they look like wrecks. Every now and again at mealtime, some youngster waiting for his second helping will while away the time by twisting his fork almost into knots. This is usually done unconsciously or, at best, semiconsciously. And it isn’t only school property that a child neglects or destroys: he leaves his new bicycle out in the rain after the newness has had a three weeks’ vogue.

Children’s destructiveness at the age of nine or ten is not meant to be evil or antisocial. Things as personal property are simply not real to them as yet. When the flight into fantasy is on them, they take their sheets and blankets and make plate ships in their rooms, and the sheets get black and the blankets get torn in the process. And what does a dirty sheet matter when you have hoisted the black flag and fired a broadside?

Really, any man or woman who tries to give children freedom should be a millionaire, for it is not fair that the natural carelessness of children should always be in conflict with the economic factor.

The argument of the disciplinarian who says that children must be compelled to respect property does not appeal to me, for it always means some sacrifice of childhood’s play life. My view is that a child should arrive at a sense of value out of his own free choice. As children leave the stage of preadolescent indifference to property, they become respecters of property. When children have freedom to live out their indifference for property, they have little chance of ever becoming profiteers and exploiters.

Girls do not wreak as much destruction as boys. That is because their fantasy life does not demand pirate ships and gangster holdups. Yet to be fair to the boys, the state of the girls’ sitting room is pretty bad. I am not convinced by the girls’ explanation that the wreckage is all the result of scraps with the visiting boys.

Some years ago, we lined the children’s bedrooms with beaverboard in order to keep the bedrooms warmer. Beaverboard is a kind of thick pasteboard; and a small child has only to see it to start picking holes in it. The beaverboard wall of the ping- pong room looked like Berlin after the bombardment. The boring of beaverboard is similar to nose boring: it is usually quite unconscious, and like other forms of destructiveness, it often has a hidden motive--often a creative meaning. If a boy needs a piece of metal for a boat keel, he will use a nail if he can find one. But if he cannot find a nail, he will use my expensive small tools if one of them happens to be about the right size. A chisel, like a nail, is only a chunk of metal to a child. A bright lad once used a very expensive whitewash brush for tarring a roof.

We have learned that children have entirely different values from adult values. If a school tries to uplift a child by hanging beautiful classical paintings on the walls and placing beautiful furniture in the rooms, it is beginning at the wrong end. Children are primitives; and until they ask for culture, they should live in as primitive and informal an environment as we can give them.

A number of years ago when we moved to our present house, we had the agony of seeing lads throwing knives at the beautiful oak door. We hastily bought two railway carriages and made them into a bungalow. There our primitives could chuck their knives as much as they wanted to. Yet, today, thirty-three years later the carriages are not in a bad state. They are inhabited by boys from twelve to sixteen years of age. The majority of those boys have reached the stage of caring for comfort and decorations. Most of them keep their compartments beautifully tidy and clean. Others live in untidiness; these are mostly boys who have recently arrived from private schools.

You can always tell the ex-private schoolboys in Summerhill: they are the dirtiest, the most unwashed, and wear the greasiest clothes. It always takes time for them to live out their primitive drives, which had been merely suppressed at the private schools. It takes time for these boys to become genuinely social under freedom.

A workshop is the most troublesome department of a free school. In the very early days, the workshop was always open to the children, and as a result, every tool got lost or damaged. A child of nine would use a fine chisel as a screwdriver. Or he would take a pair of pliers to mend his bike, and leave them lying on the path.

I then decided to have my own private workshop separated from the main workshop by a partition and locked door. But my conscience kept pricking me; I felt that I was being selfish and antisocial. At last, I knocked down the partition. In six months, there wasn’t a good tool left in what had been my private section. One boy used up all the wire staples in making cotter pins for his motorcycle. Another tried to put my lathe in screw-cutting gear when it was running. Polished planishing hammers for brass and silver work were used for breaking bricks. Tools disappeared and were never found. Worst of all, the interest in crafts died out completely, for the older pupils said, “What’s the good of going into the workshop? All the tools are rotten now.” And rotten they were. Planes had teeth in their blades, while saws had none.

I proposed at a General School Meeting that my workshop be locked again. The motion was carried. But in showing visitors around, I had a feeling of shame when I had to unlock my workshop door each time. What? Freedom and locked doors? It looked bad indeed, and I decided to give the school an extra workshop, which would remain open all the time. I had one fitted out with everything necessary - bench, vise, saws, chisels, planes, hammers, pliers, set squares, and so on.

One day, about four months later, I was showing a group of visitors around the school. When I unlocked my workshop, one of them said, “This doesn’t look like freedom, does it!”

“Well, you see,” I said hurriedly, “The children have another workshop which is open all day long. Come along, I’ll show it to you.” There was nothing left in it except the bench. Even the vise had gone. In what sundry corners of our twelve acres the chisels and hammers lay, I never knew.

The workshop situation continued to worry the staff. I was the most worried of all, because tools mean a great deal to me. I concluded that what was wrong was that the tools were used communally. “Now,” I said to myself, “if we introduce the possessive element--if each child who really wants tools has his own kit of tools - things will be different.”

I brought it up at a meeting, and the idea was well received. Next term, some of the older pupils brought their own kits of tools from home. They kept them in excellent condition and used them far more carefully than before.

Possibly it is the wide range of ages in Summerhill that causes most of the trouble. For certainly tools mean almost nothing to the very young boys and girls. Nowadays, our handiwork teacher keeps the workshop locked. I graciously allow a few senior pupils to use my shop when they want to. They do not abuse it, for they have arrived at the stage where giving tools the proper care is a conscious necessity for good work. They now also understand the difference between freedom and license.

Still, the locking of doors has increased recently at Summerhill. I brought the matter up one Saturday night at the meeting. “I don’t like it,” I said. “I took visitors round this morning and had to unlock the workshop, the laboratory, the pottery, and the theater. I propose that all public rooms be left open all day.” There was a storm of dissent. “The laboratory must be kept locked because of the poisons in there,” said some of the children, “and since the pottery adjoins the laboratory, that has to be kept locked, too.”

“We won’t have the workshop left open. Look what happened to the tools last time!” said others.

“Well, then,” I pleaded, “we can at least leave the theater open. Nobody will run away with the stage.”

The playwrights, actors, actresses, stage manager, lighting man all rose at once. Said the lighting man, “You left it open this morning and in the afternoon some idiot switched on all the lights and left them on – 3,000 watts at 9 cents per watt!”

Another said, “The small kids take out the costumes and dress up in them.”

The upshot was that my proposal to leave doors unlocked was supported by two hands - my own and that of a girl of seven. And I discovered later that she thought we were still voting on the previous motion that children of seven be allowed to go to the movies. The children were learning out of their own experience that private property should be respected.

The sad truth is that we adults are more often concerned for the safety of materials than for the safety of children. A man’s piano, his carpenter’s tools, his clothes-a hundred things--have become part of himself. To see a plane being misused is to feel a personal hurt. This love for possessions is frequently greater than the love for children. Every Let that alone! is a preferring of the object to the child. The child is a nuisance because his wishes conflict with the egoistic wishes of the adult.

Three little boys once borrowed my expensive electric torch. They began to explore to see what was in it and ruined it. To say that I enjoyed their exploration would be to lie. I was annoyed in spite of the fact that I suspected the psychological meaning of that act of destruction: symbolically, father’s torch represented father’s phallus.

One of my daydreams is that I get a millionaire’s son as a pupil. In my fantasy, I allow him to try all sorts of elaborate experiments -at his father’s expense!--for to give a neurotic child freedom is an expensive business. As a steady diet, no healthy child wants to hammer nails into the television console.

This brings to mind a question that crops up everywhere I lecture. What would you do if a boy started to hammer nails into the grand piano? Nowadays I am so expert that I can often spot the person who is going to ask the question. She generally sits in the front seat and shakes her head disapprovingly at times during the lecture.

The best answer to the question is: It doesn’t matter what you do to a child if your attitude towards the child is right. It doesn’t matter if you take the child away from the piano so long as you don’t give the child a bad conscience about hammering nails. No harm is done by insisting on your individual rights, unless you introduce the moral judgment of right and wrong. It is the use of words like naughty or bad or dirty that does harm.

To return to the young hammerer. Of course, he ought to have wood to hammer nails into, instead of the piano. Every child has a right to the tools with which he can express himself. And the tools should be his very own. But bear in mind that he will not attach a dollar-and-cents value to them.

The constant destructiveness of the problem child is something quite different from the normal child’s acts of destruction. The latter usually are not aroused by hate or anxiety: they are creative fantasy-acts not meant in a spiteful way.

Real destructiveness means hate in action. Symbolically, it means murder. It is not confined to problem children. People whose houses were occupied by the military during the war learned that soldiers are much more destructive than children. This is natural, for their job is destruction.

Creation equals life: destruction equals death. The destructive problem child is anti-life.

Destructiveness in anxious children has many components. One of them can be jealousy of a brother or sister, better loved than the destroyer feels himself to be. Another can be rebellion against all limiting authority. And still another component can be simple curiosity to see what’s inside an object.

The main factor that should concern us is not the actual destruction of the object but the repressed hate expressed by the destruction--the hate that, given the circumstances, will make a sadist out of the child.

This is a very vital question. It deals with the sickness of a world where hate flourishes from the nursery to the grave. There is, of course, much love in the world. If there were not, we could only despair for humanity. Every parent and every educator should seriously try to discover that love in himself.

Lying

If your child lies, either he is afraid of you or he is copying you. Lying parents will have lying children. If you want the truth from your child, do not lie to him. This statement is not a moral one, for we all lie at times. Sometimes we lie to keep from hurting someone else’s feelings, and of course we lie about ourselves when we are accused of egoism or bumptiousness. Instead of saying, “Mommy has a headache; be quiet,” it is much better and more honest to shout, “Stop that damned row!” But you can only say that with impunity if your children do not fear you.

Parents lie sometimes in order to preserve their dignity. “Daddy, you could fight six men, couldn’t you?” It takes some courage to reply, “No, my son, with my big stomach and my flabby muscles, I couldn’t fight a midget.”

How many fathers will confess to their children that they fear thunder or fear policemen? Hardly a man is big enough not to flinch from letting his children know that he was called “Snuffles” at school.

The family lie has two motives: to keep the child well behaved, and to impress the child with parental perfection. How many fathers and teachers would answer truthfully a child’s questions: Were you ever drunk? Did you ever swear? It is this fear of children that makes adults hypocrites.

As a small boy, I could not forgive my father for jumping over a wall to escape a wild bull. The children in their fantasies make us heroes and knights, and we try to live up to it. But one day, we are found out. One day, a child sees clearly that his parents and teachers have been liars and deceivers.

Possibly in every young life comes a period when the parents are criticized and despised as out-of-dates period follows the finding out of the parents by the child. The contempt is simply contempt for the wished-for parents of the child’s fantasies. The contrast between the wonderful dream parents and the real weak parents is too great. Later, the child returns to his parents with sympathy and understanding, but without illusions. And yet all this misunderstanding would be unnecessary if parents told the truth about themselves in the first place.

The main difficulty in telling children the truth is this: we all fail to tell ourselves the truth. We lie to ourselves, and we lie to our neighbors. Every autobiography ever written is a lie. We lie because we have been taught to live up to an unreachable standard of morality. It was our early training that gave us the skeleton that we ever after try to hide.

The adult who lies to children--lies even by indirect means --is he or she who has no real understanding of the child. Hence our whole educational system is full of lies. Our schools hand on the lie that obedience and industry are virtues, that history and French are education.

There is not a confirmed or habitual liar among my pupils. When they first come to Summerhill, they lie because they fear to tell the truth. When they find that the school is a school without a policeman, they find no use for lies. Most lying on the part of children is prompted by fear; and when fear is absent, lying diminishes. I cannot say it disappears entirely. A boy will tell you he has broken a window, but he will not tell you he has raided the icebox or stolen a tool. The complete absence of lying would be too much to hope for.

Freedom will not do away with fantasy lies in children. Too often parents make a mountain out of this agreeable mole-hill. When little Jimmy came to me saying that his Daddy had sent him a real Rolls Bentley I said to him, “I know. I saw it at the front door. Terrific car.”

“Go on” he said, “You know I was really only kidding.”

Now it may seem paradoxical and illogical, but I make a distinction between lying and being dishonest. You can be honest and yet a liar--that is, you can be honest about the big things in life although sometimes dishonest about the lesser things. Thus many of our lies are meant to save others pain. Truth- telling would become an evil if it impelled me to write, “Dear Sir, your letter was so long and dull that I could not be bothered reading it all.” Or if it forced you to a would-be musician: “Thank you for playing, but you murdered that Etude.” Adults’ lying is generally altruistic, but children’s lying is always local and personal. The best way to make a child a liar for life is to insist that he speak the truth and nothing but the truth.

I grant it is very hard to be always truthful, but when one makes a decision not to lie to a child or in front of a child, one finds it easier than one expected. The only good permissible lie is the kind of lie one has to tell when life is in danger-- for example, when a seriously ill child is not told of his mother’s death.

Most of our mechanical etiquette is a living lie. We say “Thank you” when we do not mean it; we doff our hats to women we do not respect.

Speaking a lie is a minor frailty; living a lie is a major calamity. It is the parent who lives a lie who is really dangerous. “I have asked from my son only one thing--absolute truth at all rimes,” said the father of a thieving son of sixteen. That man hated his wife and was hated by her in return, although the fact was disguised under a mask of darlings and dearests. The son dimly sensed that something was very wrong with his home. What possible chance has the son of such a man to grow up being anything but conventionally dishonest when the home itself is a glaring lie? The boy’s stealing was his pathetic way of finding the love that was lacking in the home.

Indeed, a child may lie in imitation of parental falsehood. It is impossible for a child to be truthful in a home where the father and mother no longer love each other. The wretched pretense that the poor couple has to keep up cannot deceive the child. He is then driven into an unreal fantasy world of make-believe. Remember that children feel when they do not know.

The churches perpetuate the lie that man is born in sin and that he requires redemption. The law furthers the lie that humanity can be bettered by hate in the form of punishment. The doctors and drug firms keep up the lie that health depends on loading oneself with inorganic drugs.

In a society full of lies, the parent finds it most difficult to be honest. He tells his child, “If you masturbate, you’ll go mad.” In all parental lying, there is incredible ignorance of the damage done to the child.

I hold that the parent does not need to lie; moreover, he dare not lie. Many homes exist without lying, and it is from such homes that come clear-eyed, sincere children. A parent can answer any and every question with truth, from where babies come from to telling mother’s age.

I have never consciously told a lie to my pupils in thirty-eight years, and indeed never had any desire to. But that is not quite correct, for I told a big lie one term. A girl, whose unhappy history I knew, stole a pound. The theft committee -three boys-- saw her spend money on ice cream and cigarettes, and they cross-examined her. “I got the pound from Neill,” she told them, and they brought her to me, asking, “Did you give Liz a quid!” Hastily sensing the situation, I replied blandly, “Why, yes, I did.” Had I given her away, I knew that forever afterward she would have no trust in me. Her symbolic stealing of love in the form of money would have received another hostile setback. I had to prove that I was on her side all the way. I know that if her home had been honest and fun, such a situation would never have arisen. I lied with a purpose-a curative purpose - but in all other circumstances, I dare not lie.

Children, when free, do not lie very much. Our village policeman, calling one day, was much astonished when a boy came into my office saying, “Hi, Neill, I’ve broken a lounge window.” Children lie mostly to protect themselves. Lying flourishes in homes where fear flourishes. Abolish fear and the lying will decay.

There is, however, a type of lie that has no fear basic-the lie due to fantasy. “Mommy, I saw a dog as big as a cow” is on the same level as the angler’s lie about the one that got away. In these cases, the lie enhances the personality of the liar. The obvious way to react to such lies is to enter into the spirit of the game. So that when Billy tells me his daddy has a Roll Royce, I say, “I know. Beauty, isn’t it. Can you drive it?” I question if this romantic lying would exist among children who had been self-regulated from birth. I don’t think they would need to overcompensate for their inferiority by making up tall stories.

An illegitimate child does not know he is born out of wedlock, yet he feels that he is different from other children. Not, of course, if he knows the truth, and is among people who don’t care whether or not he was born in wedlock. It is because feeling is so much more important than knowing that ignorant parents do so much harm with their lies and prohibitions. It is the heart of the child that is damaged, rather than the head. But heads never cause neurosis; only hearts do.

Parents must tell adopted children the truth about their adoption. A stepmother who lets a child of the first marriage believe that he is her own son is looking for trouble, and in most cases will get it. I have seen some bad traumas in later life when adolescents discovered hidden truths. There are always a few hateful people around who will gladly tell youth spiteful truths.

Armor your children against all spiteful busybodies by making up your mind never to lie to any child--your own or the children of anyone else. There is no other way but the way of absolute truth for a child. If daddy is an ex-convict sonny should know it. If mommy was a barmaid, daughter should be told.

The truth becomes awkward when the question is, “Mommy, which of us kids do you love best?” The universal and often untrue answer is the sweet “I love all of you the same, darling.” What the answer should be, I do not know. Perhaps the lie is justified here, for the shattering “I love Tommy best,” would have disastrous results.

The parent who is honest about sex will not be dishonest about other things. Lies about the policeman coming to punish naughty children, lies that smoking stops growth, lies about Mommy having a headache instead of Mommy having a period, are rife in a million homes.

Recently, a woman teacher left Summerhill to teach in a London kindergarten. Her little pupils asked her where babies came from. Next morning, half a dozen furious mothers came to the school, calling her a “dirty-minded bitch” and demanding that she be fired.

A child brought up in freedom will not consciously lie because there is no need to. He will not lie to protect himself because of fear of retribution. But he will engage in fantasy lying--telling tall stories of things that never happened.

As to lying through fear, I see a new generation that will have no skeletons to hide. It will be frank and honest about everything. It will not require the word “lie” in its vocabulary. Lying is always cowardice, and cowardice is the result of ignorance.

Responsibility

In many homes, the child’s ego is suppressed because the parents treat the child as a perpetual infant. I have known girls of fourteen who were not trusted by their parents to light a fire. Parents, with the best of intention, keep back responsibility from the child.

“You must take your sweater, dear; I am sure it is going to rain.”

“Now don’t go near the railway tracks.”

“Have you washed your face?”

Once, when a new pupil came to Summerhill, her mother told me that the girl was very dirty in her habits; that she had to tell her ten times a day to wash. From the day following her arrival, that child took a cold bath every morning, and at least two hot ones a week. She was always clean in face and hands. Her lack of cleanliness at home--which may have existed only in the mother’s imagination--was due to her being treated as a baby.

Children should be allowed almost infinite responsibility. Montessori-trained infants carry tureens full of hot soup. One of our youngest pupils, aged seven, uses all sorts of tools: chisels, axes, saws, knives. I cut my fingers oftener than he does.

Duty should not be confused with responsibility. A sense of duty should be acquired later in life, if at all. The word duty has so many sinister associations. I think of women who have missed life and love because they felt compelled by a sense of duty to stay and look after elderly parents. I think of the married couples who have long since ceased to love each other but go on living together miserably because of their sense of duty. Many a child away at boarding school or at summer camp feels the duty to write home is irksome, especially when he must write the letter on Sunday afternoon.

It is a fallacy that responsibility should be reckoned by age, a fallacy that puts the lives of youth in the hands of the feeble old men whom we call statesmen, who might better be described as staticmen. It is this fallacy that assumes that every member of a family is the protector and guide of the ones immediately younger than himself. It is hard for parents to realize that their son of six is not a reasonable, logical being who will understand such a sentence as, “You are older than Tommy, and at your age you should know that he isn’t allowed to run out on the road.”

A child should not be asked to face responsibilities for which he is not ready, nor be saddled with decisions he is not yet old enough to make. The watchword must be common sense.

At Summerhill we do not ask our five-year-olds whether or not they want fireguards. We do not ask a six-year-old to decide whether or not he should go outdoors when he is running a temperature. Nor do we ask a rundown child whether or not he should go to bed when he is overtired. One does not seek a child’s permission to give him prescribed remedies when he is sick.

But the imposition of authority--necessary authority--on a child does not in any way conflict with the idea that a child should be given just about as much responsibility as he can accept at his particular age. In determining the amount of responsibility that a parent should give his child, the parent must always commit his inner soul. He must first examine himself.

Parents who refuse to let children select their own clothes, for example, are generally motivated by the idea that the child might choose clothes which would not do credit to the parents’ social standing.

Parents who censor their child’s reading, movie-going, or friends are, generally speaking, trying to impose their own ideas on the child by pressure. Such parents merely rationalize that they know what is best, whereas their deep motivation is likely to be one of exercising authoritarian power.

By and large, parents should bestow as much responsibility as they can upon a child, with due regard for his physical safety. Only in this way will a parent develop the child’s self-assurance.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 725