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RH: - and least happiest?

Zoe Readhead

 

Zoe Readhead is the daughter of A. S. Neill, the pioneering educationalist who founded Summerhill School in 1921. Summerhill has successfully, and controversially, combined an anti-authoritarian approach to education with a belief in self-government and personal freedom for children. Highly influential in the field of education Summerhill is nonetheless used to threats from the orthodoxy. It is presently under review by Ofsted.

Neill believed in children and trusted in their intrinsic goodness. There was therefore no need for discipline, coercion, enforced training or instruction. When he died in 1973 the school continued under his wife, Ena Neill. At Summerhill lessons are not compulsory and the rules and organisation of the community are created in a weekly meeting where everybody, both pupils and staff have an equal say.

In 1985 Zoe Readhead, Neill's only daughter who had herself been a pupil at the school, took over the headship of Summerhill.

 

"The function of the child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best" - A.S.Neill.

 

"To be a free soul, happy in work, happy in friendship, and happy in love or to be a miserable bundle of conflicts, hating one's self and hating humanity - one or the other is the legacy that parents and teachers give to every child" - A. S. Neill.

 

 

Richard Harvey: What was it like for you as a child, having A.S.Neill for your father?

 

Zoe Readhead: Well very ordinary really because that was the normal to me. So as a child I knew my father was famous and I suppose I did get used to people coming down and wanting to talk to me or say hello to me but if that's the normal it doesn't seem to be special, so I really enjoyed my childhood. It was great but I can't say I thought it was unusual at the time [laughs].

RH: What are your happiest childhood memories of him?

 

ZR: Oh gosh, I mean I don't know. I haven't got happiest ones. I remember being a little tiny child and sitting on his foot - he used to put one leg over the other - and I used to sit on his foot and ride it like a horse. He had huge great feet. Things like that I remember. I remember going rowing with him when I was a teenager and he was, by then, quite an old man. My friend and I went on a lake with him and he gallantly rode us around [laughs]. It didn't occur to us that he was an old chap and shouldn't really be doing that sort of thing. I didn't spend a lot of time with him really because at school you tend not to, even if your parents are there, you don't really spend time with them because you're so busy just being with the other kids which proves to me even more that children don't need their parents as much as parents would like them to think they do [laughs] and given a choice they spend time away. So he was a vague figure, during term-time he was just a vague figure that was there but I didn't sort of see an awful lot of him although obviously I could have done. He was around but I just was getting on with my own life.



 

RH: - and least happiest?

 

ZR: Thinking he was going to die soon because he was an old man. I mean he was 83 when I was... er, sixty, sixty-four when I was born and I used to have nightmares about it when I was a little girl. I was aware of the fact that he was old and I used to wake up crying when I was eight, nine-ish because I knew that he was going to die and I thought he was going to die soon and it frightened me.

 


Date: 2016-01-05; view: 827


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