Power and Authority

Before psychology discovered the importance of the unconscious, a child was considered a reasonable being with the power to will to do good or evil. His mind was assumed to be a blank slate on which any conscientious teacher had only to write the script.

Now we understand that there is nothing static about a child; he is all dynamic urge. He seeks to express his wishes in action. By nature he is self-interested, and he seeks always to try his power. If there is sex in everything there is also the drive for power in everything.

The very young child probably finds that noise expresses best of all his power over his environment. The reaction of his adult companions to noise may give him an exaggerated idea of the importance of noise. Or the noise in itself may be important enough.

Noise is often suppressed in the nursery; but before that another suppression takes place--the suppression involved in making the child clean in habits. We can only guess that a child feels himself powerful in his excretory acts. It seems likely that his toilet means much to him, for it is his first act of making. I say we can only guess, for no one can say what a child of one or two years feels and thinks. Certainly one finds children of seven and eight who have a strong feeling of power in their excretory acts.

A normal woman fears a lion; a neurotic woman fears a mouse. The lion is real, but the mouse represents a repressed interest that the woman is afraid to recognize. Now the child’s wishes, too, can be converted into phobias by suppression. Many children have night terrors: they fear ghosts or robbers or bogeymen. Often, unknowing parents believe that a story told by a nursemaid is responsible for these terrors, but the nursemaid’s story merely gives the phobia a form. The root of the terror is the suppression of sex interest by the parents. The child fears his own buried interests just as the woman with the mouse phobia fears her buried interests.

The suppression need not be primarily one of sex suppression. The angry father who shouts, “Stop that row!” can convert the child’s interest in noise into a fearful interest in father. When a child’s wish is thwarted, he hates. If I take a toy from a bright boy of three, he would kill me if he could.

One day, I was sitting with Billie. I was in a deck chair striped black and orange. I, of course, am father substitute to Billie.

“Tell me a story,” he said.

“You tell me one,” said I.

No, he insisted, he could not tell me a story; I must tell him one.

“Well tell one together,” said I. “When I stop, you say something-eh.? Well then, there was once a--”

Billie looked at my chair with its stripes. “Tiger,” he said, and I knew I was the animal with stripes.

“And it lay at the roadside outside this school. One day, a boy went down the road and his name was....”

“Donald,” said Billie. Donald is his chum.

“Then the tiger sprang out and.. .”

“Ate him up,” said Billie promptly.

“Then Derrick said, ‘I won’t have this tiger eating up my brother.’ So he buckled on his revolver and went down the road. And the tiger jumped out and .. .”

“Ate him up,” said Billie cheerfully.

“Then Neill got wild. ‘I simply won’t have this tiger eating up all my school,’ he said; and he buckled on his two revolvers and went out. The tiger jumped out and.. .”

“Ate him up, of course.”

“But then Billie said that this wouldn’t do. So he buckled on his two revolvers, his sword, his dagger, and his machine gun and went down the road. And the tiger jumped out and.. .”

“He killed the tiger,” said Billie modestly.

“Excellent!” I cried. “He killed the tiger. He dragged its body up to the door and came in and called a General School Meeting. Then one of the staff said, ‘Now that Neill is inside the tiger we shall need a new headmaster, and I propose.. .’

Billie looked down and was silent.

“And I propose...” “You know well enough it was me,” he said with annoyance. “And so Billie became headmaster of Summerhill School,” I said. “And what do you think was the first thing he did?”

“Went up to your room and took your turning lathe and type writer,” he said, without hesitation or embarrassment. I have another story of Billie. One day he said to me, “I know where I can get a bigger dog than the one Father has.” His father had two Skye terriers.

“Where?” I asked, but he shook his head, and would not tell me.

“What will you call it, Billie?”

“Hose pipe,” he answered.

I handed him a sheet of paper. “Let me see you draw a hose pipe,” I said.

He drew a large phallus. I suddenly thought of an old cycle pump I had. I fetched it and showed Billie how to use it as a water squirt.

“Now,” said I, “you have a bigger hose pipe than father has,” and he laughed loudly. For two days, he went round the school gleefully squirting water. Then he lost interest in his hose pipe.

The question is this: Is Billie a sex case or a power case? I think he is a power case. His wish to kill the tiger (me) was the repetition of his wish when he first saw his father. It had nothing directly to do with sex. And his wish to have a phallus bigger than father’s was a power wish. Billie’s fantasies are power fantasies. I hear him telling the other boys tall stories of the number of airplanes he can drive at one time. There is ego in everything.

The thwarted wish is the beginning of fantasy. Every child wants to be big; every factor in his environment tells him that he is small. The child conquers his environment by fleeing from it; he rises on wings and lives his dream in fantasy. The ambition to be an engine driver is a power motive: to control a train rushing along at great speed is one of the best illustrations of power.

Peter Pan is popular with children--not because he does not grow up - but because he can fly and fight pirates. He is popular with grownups because they want to be children, without responsibilities, without struggles. But no boy really wants to remain a boy. The desire for power urges him on.

Now the suppression of infantile noise and curiosity warps the child’s natural love of power. The youths who are called delinquents and who are generally said to be suffering from too much movie going are trying to express power that has been suppressed. I have generally found that the antisocial boy, the leader of a gang of window breakers, becomes under freedom a strong supporter of law and order.

Ansi had been a leader of lawbreakers in her school, and the school could not keep her. Two nights after her arrival at Summerhill she began to fight with me playfully, but soon she was no longer playing. For about three hours, she kicked and bit me, saying all the time that she would make me lose my temper. I refused to lose my temper and kept smiling. It was an effort. Finally, one of my teachers sat down and played soft music. Ansi quieted down. Her attack was partly sexual; but on the power side, I stood for law and order. I was headmaster.

Ansi found life rather confusing. At Summerhill she found there were no laws to break, and she felt like a fish out of water. She tried to stir up mischief among the other pupils, but succeeded only with the very young ones. She was vying once more to find her accustomed power in leading a gang against authority. She was really a lover of law and order. But in the domain of law and order that the adults ruled there was no scope to express her power. As second best, she chose the side of rebellion against law and order.

A week after her arrival, we had a General School Meeting. Ansi stood and leered at everything. “I’ll vote for laws,” she said, “but only for the fun of having some laws to break.” Our housemother got up. “Ansi shows that she doesn’t want laws that everyone will keep,” she said. “I propose that we have no laws at all. Let us have chaos”

Ansi shouted “Hurrah!” and led the pupils out of the room. This she easily did because they were younger children, and they had not reached the age of having developed a social conscience. She took them to the workshop and they all armed themselves with saws. They announced their intention of cutting down all the fruit trees. I, as usual, went to dig in the garden.

Ten minutes later, Ansi came to me “What do we have to do to stop the chaos and have laws again?” she asked in a mild tone.

“I can’t give you any advice,” I replied.

“Can we call another General School Meeting!” she asked.

“Of course you can, only I won’t come to it. We decided to have chaos.” She went away and I continued digging.

In a short time, she returned “We had a meeting of the children,’ she said, “and we voted to have a full School Meeting. Will you come?”

“A full meeting?” said I. “Yes, I’ll come:”

In the meeting, Ansi was serious, and we passed our laws in peace. Total damage done during chaotic period--one clothes- pole sawed in two.

For years Ansi had found pleasure in leading her school gang against authority. In stirring up rebellion, she was doing something she hated. She hated chaos. Underneath, she was a law-abiding citizen. But Ansi had a great desire for power. She was happy only when she was directing others. In rebelling against her teacher, she was trying to make herself more important than the teacher. She hated laws because she hated the power that made laws. She identified herself with her punishing mother, and was sadistic in her attitude to others. We can only conjecture that her hatred of authority was objectively a hate of her mother’s authority; and subjectively, a hate of the bossing mother in herself. I find such power cases much more difficult to cure than sex cases. One can with comparative ease track down the incidents and teachings that give a child a bad conscience about sex but to track down the thousands of incidents and teachings that have made a child a sadistic power person is difficult indeed.

I think of one of my failures. When I taught in Germany, Maroslava, a Slavic girl of thirteen, was sent to me. She hated her father intensely. For six months, that girl made my school life a little hell. She attacked me in the School Meetings; and on one occasion, she carried a motion that I be put out of the school on the ground that I was useless. I had three days off, and was beginning to enjoy myself writing a book, when unfortunately there was another School Meeting at which it was voted (one dissent, of course) that I should be asked to return. Maroslava was always saying, “I won’t have any boss in the school.” She was a power person with a tremendous ego. When she left (I had to tell her mother that I could not cure her), I shook hands with her.

“Well,” I said pleasantly, “I didn’t help you much, did I “

“Do you know why” she said with a dry smile. “I’ll tell you. The first day I came to your school, I was making a box, and you said I was using too many nails. From that moment, I knew that you were just like every other schoolmaster in the world--a boss. From that moment, you could not possibly help me.”

“You are right,” I said. “Good-bye.”

Hate may be more often thwarted power than thwarted love. The hate that Maroslava radiated was a hate one could feel. To seek power is as much a feminine characteristic as a masculine. Generally, a woman seeks power over people, while a man seeks power over material; and Maroslava and Ansi most certainly sought power over people.

No child under eight is selfish; he is only an egoist. In the case of a boy of six whose father teaches him to be unselfish and beats him when he is selfish, his conscience at first is objective: I must share my sweets when father is looking. But a process of identification begins. The boy wants to be as big as father--the power motive. He wants to have as much of mother as father has. He identifies himself with father. And in the process, he takes his father’s philosophy. He becomes a little Conservative or a little Liberal. He, as it were, adds his father to his own soul. Conscience, formerly father’s voice from without, now becomes father’s voice from within. This is the process by which some people become Baptists or Calvinists or Communists.

Girls who were spanked by their mothers grow into spankers themselves. An excellent illustration is the game in which children play school. Teacher whacks all the time.

The child’s desire to be grown up is a power wish. The mere size of adults will give a child a sense of inferiority. Why should grownups be allowed to sit up late? Why do they have the best things--typewriters, automobiles, good tools, watches?

My boy pupils delight in soaping their faces when I am shaving. The desire to smoke, too, is mainly a wish to be grown up. Generally, it is the only child whose power is most thwarted; and therefore it is the only child who is most difficult to handle in a school.

I once made the mistake of bringing a young boy to school ten days before the other pupils arrived. He was very happy mixing with the teachers, sitting in the staff room, having a bedroom to himself. But when the other children came, he became very antisocial. Alone he had helped to make and repair many articles; when the others came, he began to destroy things. His pride was injured. He had suddenly to cease being an adult; he had to sleep in a room with four other boys; he had to go to bed early His violent protest made me decide never again to give a child the opportunity of identifying himself with grownups.

It is only thwarted power that works for evil. Human beings are good; they want to do good; they want to love and be loved. Hate and rebellion are only-thwarted love and thwarted power.

Jealousy

Jealousy arises from the sense of possession. If sexual love were a genuine transcendence of self, a man would rejoice when he saw his girl kiss another man, because he would rejoice to see her happy. But sexual love is possessive. It is the man with a strong sense of possession who commits a crime of jealousy.

The absence of any visible sexual jealousy among the Trobriand Islanders suggests that jealousy may be a by-product of our more complicated civilization. Jealousy arises from the combination of love with possessiveness about the loved object. It has been often found that a jealous man does not usually shoot the rival who runs away with his wife-he shoots the wife. Probably he kills the woman to put his possession beyond the reach of touch, just as a mother rabbit will eat her young if people handle them too much. The infant ego will have all or nothing: It cannot share.

Jealousy has more to do with power than it has to do with sex. Jealousy is the reaction following an injured ego. “I am not first. I am not the favored one. I am placed in a position of inferiority.” This certainly is the psychology of jealousy that we find among, say, professional singers and comedians. In my student days, I used to make friends with stage comedians by the simple method of saying that the other comedian in the cast was rotten.

In jealousy, there is always a definite fear of loss. The opera singer hates another prima donna, dreading that her own applause will suffer in volume and intensity. Indeed by comparison, it is possible that fear of loss of esteem accounts for more jealousy than all the love rivals in the world.

In the family, much depends, therefore, on the elder child’s feeling of being appreciated. If self-regulation has given him so much independence that he does not need to be constantly seeking his parents’ approval, then his jealousy of the newcomer in the family will be less than if he were an unfree child, one tied forever to his mother’s apron strings, and therefore never quite independent. This does not mean that parents of siblings should stand aside and merely observe how the elder child reacts to the younger. From the start, any action that might aggravate jealousy should be avoided, such as a too obvious showing off of the baby to visitors. Children of all ages have a keen sense of justice rather of injustice-and wise parents will try to set that the younger child is not in any way favored or given preference over the elder, although this is almost impossible to avoid to some extent.

That baby gets mother’s breast may seem an injustice to his older brother. But it may not be so, if the older one feels that he has been allowed to live out naturally his breast-feeding stage. In drawing round conclusions about this aspect, we need much more evidence. I have had no experience of the self-regulated child’s reaction to the arrival of a new baby. Whether jealousy is a permanent trait in human nature, I do not know.

In my long experience with children, I have found that in later life many persons retain with angry emotion some memory of what they considered an injustice they suffered in their kindergarten days. This is especially so with the memory of an incident in which the older child was punished for something that the younger one did. “I always got the blame” is the cry of many an older sibling. In any quarrel where the baby cries, the busy mother’s automatic reaction is to storm at the older child.

Jim, aged eight, had a habit of kissing everyone he met. His kisses were more like sucking than kissing. I concluded that Jim had never got over his infantile interest in sucking. I went out and bought him a feeding bottle. Jim had his bottle every night when he went to bed. The other boys, who at first went into screams of derisive laughter (thus hiding their interest in bottles), soon became jealous of Jim. Two of them demanded bottles. Jim suddenly became the little brother who long ago got the monopoly of mother’s breast. I bought bottles for all of them. The fact that they wanted bottles proved that these boys still retained their interest in sucking.

Jealousy is something to be particularly guarded against in the dining room. Even some of the staff are jealous when visitors receive any special dish; and if the cook gives one senior pupil asparagus, the others will wax eloquent about kitchen favorites.

Some years ago, the arrival of a tool chest brought trouble into the school. The children whose fathers could not afford to buy them good tools became jealous, and for three weeks they were antisocial. One boy who knew all about handling tools borrowed a plane. He took the iron out of the plane by hammering the cutting edge; and of course, he spoiled the plane. He told me that he had forgotten just how to take an iron out. Whether conscious or unconscious, the destructive act was one of jealousy.

It may be impossible to give each child a room to himself, but each child should have a corner with which he can do what he likes. In Summerhill schoolrooms, each pupil has a table and his own area, and he decorates his corner with joy.

Jealousy sometimes arose out of P.Ls. “Why should Mary get P.Ls. and not me?” Sometimes a girl deliberately and consciously behaved as a problem child merely to be included in the P.L. list. Once, one girl smashed some windows; and when asked what her idea was, she replied, “I want Neill to give me P.Ls.” A girl who behaves in this way is usually a girl whose father has not, in her estimation, paid sufficient attention to her.

Since children bring their home problems and jealousies to school with them, what I fear most in my work with them are the letters parents write their children. I once had to write to a father, “Please do not write to your son. Every time a letter comes from you, he goes bad.” The father did not answer me but he ceased to write to his son. Then about two months later, I saw the boy receive a letter from his father. I was annoyed but said nothing. That night about twelve, I heard awful screams from the boy’s bedroom. I rushed into his room just in time to save our kitten from strangulation. Next day, I went to his room to look for the letter. I found it. “You will be glad to hear,” ran a sentence, “that Tom [the younger brother] had his birthday last Monday, and Auntie Lizzie gave him a kitten” The fantasies that arise from jealousy know no bounds in criminality. The jealous child kills off his rivals in fantasy. Two brothers had to travel home from Summerhill for the holidays. The elder got into a state of fear. “I’m frightened I will lose Fred on the way,” he kept saying. He was afraid his daydream would come true.

“No,” said a boy of eleven to me, referring to his younger brother, “no, I wouldn’t exactly like him to die; but if he went away on a long, long journey to India or somewhere and came back when he was a man, I’d like that.”

Every pupil new to Summerhill has to endure three months of unconscious hate from the other pupils. For a child’s first reaction to a new arrival in the family is a hate reaction. The older child usually believes that mother has eyes only for the newcomer, for the baby sleeps with mother and takes up all mother’s attention. The child’s repressed hate of his mother is often compensated for by an excess of tenderness to her. It is the older child in a family who hates most. The younger child has never known what it is to be king in the house. When I come to think of it, I see that my worst cases of neurosis are either only children or eldest sons and daughters.

Parents unwittingly feed the hate of an older child. “Why, Tom, your young brother wouldn’t make such a fuss about a cut finger.”

I remember when I was a boy; another boy was always held up as an example to me. He was a marvelous scholar, was never known to be anywhere but at the top of the class, took all the prizes in a canter. He died. I recall his funeral as being rather a pleasant affair.

Teachers often encounter the jealousy of parents. I have lost pupils more than once because the parents were jealous of the child’s affection for Summerhill and for me. It is understandable. In a free school, the children are allowed to do exactly what they like as long as they do not break the social laws, which are made, by staff and pupils at General School Meetings. Often, a child does not even want to go home for the holidays, for to go home is to be encompassed by restrictive home laws. The parents who do not become jealous of the school or its teachers are those who treat their children at home just the same as we treat their children in Summerhill. They believe in their children and give them the freedom to be themselves. These children delight in going home.

There need be no rivalry between parent and teacher. If the parent turns the child’s love into hate by arbitrary orders and rules, he must expect the child to seek love elsewhere. A teacher is merely a father or a mother surrogate. It is the thwarted love for parents that is showered on the teacher only because the teacher is easier to love than the father is.

I couldn’t count the number of fathers I have known who hated their sons because of jealousy. These were the Peter Pan fathers who wanted mother love from their wives, hating the young rival and often beating him cruelly. You, Mr. Father, will find your situation complicated by the family triangle. Once your baby is born you are, in some measure, odd man out. Some women lose all desire for a sex life after having a baby. In any case, divided love will characterize the home. You should be conscious of what is happening; otherwise you will find your self-being jealous of your own child. At Summerhill, we have had scores of children who suffered from either maternal or paternal jealousy, mostly cases in which the father’s jealousy had made him sad and even brutal to the son. If a father vies with his children for the love of Mother, his children will be more or less neurotic.

I have seen many a mother who hated to see her daughter show all the freshness and beauty that she, the mother, had lost. Usually, these were mothers who had nothing to do in life, who lived in the past and daydreamed of the conquests they had made at dances many long years ago.

I used to find that I was irritated when two young things fell in love. I would rationalize my emotion by thinking that my irritation was really a fear of awkward consequences. When I realized that it was nothing but a possessive jealousy of the young, all my irritation and fear went away.

Jealousy in youth is a real thing. A girl of seventeen told me that at the private boarding school she had been going to, her teacher considered breasts shameful things that should be hidden by tight lacing. An extreme case, no doubt, yet containing in exaggerated form a truth that we try to forget: age -disappointed and repressed-hates youth became age is jealousy of youth.

Divorce

What makes a child neurotic? In many cases it is the fact that his parents do not love each other. The neurotic child craves love, and in his home there is no love. He hears his parents snarl at each other. They may honestly try to keep their secret from their child, but the child can sense an atmosphere. He judges by appearances more than by what he hears. No child is deceived by words like dearest and darling.

I have had, among others, the following cases:

Girl of fifteen, thief. Mother disloyal to father. Girl knew.

Girl of fourteen, unhappy dreamer. Neurosis said to date from a day when she saw her father with his lover.

Girl of twelve hated everyone. Father impotent; mother soured.

Boy of eight, thief. Father and mother quarreled openly.

Boy of nine; lived in fantasy (anal-erotic mostly). Parents furtively hostile to each other.

Girl of fourteen, bed-wetter. Parents living apart.

Boy of nine; impossible at home owing to ill temper; lived in fantasy of grandeur. Mother unhappily married.

I realize how difficult it is to cure a child when the home remains a place of lovelessness. Often I have answered a mother’s question, “What shall I do about my child?” with the reply, “Go and get yourself analyzed.”

Fathers and mothers have often said to me that they would separate were it not for the children. It would often be better for the children if unloving parents did separate. A thousand times better! Unloving matrimonial life means an unhappy home; and an unhappy atmosphere is always psychic death to a child.

I have sometimes found that the young son of an unhappily married mother reacts to his mother in terms of hate. He torments his mother in a sadistic manner. One boy used to bite and scratch his mother. Less extreme cases torture the mother by continually demanding her attention. According to the Oedipus complex theory, it should be the other way around. The little boy looks upon his father as a rival for mother’s love. One would naturally suppose that in a case where the father is manifestly out of the running, the son would, as the successful suitor, show increased tenderness to his mother. I often find him instead showing an extraordinary cruelty to his mother.

The unhappily married mother will always show favoritism. The marital outlet for love being closed, she will concentrate her love on one child. The essential thing in a child’s life is love, but the unhappily married parent cannot give love in the proper proportion. Either he gives too little or too much love. It is difficult to say which is the greater evil.

The child starved for love becomes a hating individual, anti-social and critical. The child overwhelmed with love becomes a mother’s darling, a timid, feminine soul, always seeking the safety of the mother. The mother may be symbolized by a house (as in agoraphobia), by Mother Church, or by Mother Country.

I have no concern with divorce laws. It is not my business to advise adults. It is my concern, however, to study children; and it is important to suggest to parents that the home must be changed if the neurotic child is to have any chance of recovery. Parents must be courageous enough, if necessary, to realize that their influence is bad for their children. One mother said to me, “But if I do not see my child for two years, I shall lose him.”

“You have lost him already,” I answered; and she had lost him, for he was unhappy at home.

Parental Anxiety

It might be said that the anxious parent is the one who cannot give -give love, give honor, give respect, and give trust.

Recently, the mother of a new boy came to visit Summerhill. For a weekend, she made the boy’s life miserable. He wasn’t hungry, but she stood over him and made him eat his lunch. He was grubby after making a tree house, and she ran him off the grounds and into the house to scrub him clean. He had spent his pocket money on ice cream, and she gave him a lecture about how bad ice cream was for his stomach. She corrected him when he addressed me as Neill, and she demanded that he call me Mr. Neill.

I said to her, “Why the devil did you enroll him in this school when you have such a fussy, anxious attitude toward him?”

She answered innocently, “Why? Because I want him to be free and happy. I want him to become an independent man, unspoiled by outside influence.”

I said, “Oh,” and lit a cigarette. The woman had no suspicion; that she was treating her boy cruelly and stupidly, that she was transferring to him all the anxiety that her own frustrated life gave her.

I ask: What can be done about it? Nothing! Nothing but to give a few illustrations of the damage done by parental anxiety and to hope for the best, hope that perhaps one parent in a million will say, “I never thought of that! I thought I was doing right. Maybe I was wrong.”

In one case a distracted mother, writes, “I am at my wits’ end to know what to do with my son of twelve who has suddenly begun to steal things from Woolworth’s. Please, please tell me what to do.” It is just as though a man wrote to complain that after consuming a bottle of whisky every day for twenty years, he finds that his liver is dead. It would probably do no good to advise him to cut out the drinking at that stage. And so I usually advise a frantic mother who has a serious child behavior problem to consult a child psychologist or to look up the address of the nearest children’s clinic.

I could, of course, answer the distracted mother, “My dear woman, your son has begun to steal because his home is unsatisfactory and unhappy. Why not set about making his home a good home?” If I were to do this, I might give her a bad conscience. Even if she had the best will in the world, she could not change her son’s environment because she doesn’t know how. What’s more, even if she knew how, she wouldn’t have the emotional capacity to carry out the program.

Certainly, with the guidance of a child psychologist a willing woman could bring about quite a change. A psychologist might recommend a separation from an unloved or unloving husband, or moving the mother-in-law out of the home. What a psychologist is unlikely to alter is the inner woman, the moralist, the anxious, frightened mother, the sex antagonist, the nag. Merely changing the external conditions too often has its limitations.

I have mentioned the frightened mother. I recall an interview with another kind of parent. She was the mother of a prospective pupil, a girl of seven. Every question she asked was an anxious one: “Does someone see that their teeth are brushed twice a day? Will she be watched so that she doesn’t walk on the highway? Will she get lessons every day? Will someone give her the medicine each night?” Anxious mothers unconsciously make their children a part of their own unsolved problems. One mother was always in a state of fear concerning her daughter’s health. She was continually writing me long letters of instructions regarding what the girl should eat or, rather, not eat, how she should be clothed, and so on. I have had many children of anxious parents. Invariably, the child acquires the parental anxiety; hypochondria is a frequent result.

Martha had a small brother. The parents are both anxious people. I hear Martha in the garden shouting to her brother. “Don’t go into the pool—you’ll get your feet wet.” Or “Don’t play with that sand-you’ll soil your new pants.” I say I hear Martha, but I should have said that I heard Martha-when she first came to school. Nowadays, she doesn’t care if her brother looks like a chimney sweep. It is only during the last week of the term that her old anxiety returns, for then she realizes she is returning home to an atmosphere of constant anxiety.

I sometimes think that strict schools owe part of their popularity to the fact that the pupils delight in going home for holidays. Parents see in the happy faces of their children a love of home, whereas it is just as often hatred of the school. The hate of the child has been bestowed on the stern teachers; the love of the child is thrown lavishly upon the parents. This is the same psychological mechanism used by a mother when she shifts a child’s hate to his father by saying, “Wait till your father comes home tonight. He’ll give it to you!”

Often, I hear doctors and other professional men say, “I send my boys to a good private school so that they will get a good accent and will meet people who will be useful to them later on.” They take it for granted that our social values will continue just as they have for generations. Fear of the future is a very real thing in parents.

Parents want disciplined schools when the home is a center of strict parental authority. The strict school carries on the tradition of keeping the child down, keeping him quiet, respectful, castrated. Moreover, the school does excellent work in treating only the head of the child. It restrains his emotional life, his creative urge. It trains him to be obedient to all the dictators and bosses of life. The fear that began in the nursery is increased by stern teachers whose rigid discipline grows out of their own power drives. The average parent, seeing only the exterior child with his school blazer, with his superficial manners, with his worship of football games is pleased to see how successfully his dear son is being schooled. It is tragic to see young life sacrificed on this antediluvian altar of so-called education. The strict school demands only power--and the fearful parent is satisfied.

Like every ego-seeking power, the ego of the teacher will strive to draw the children to himself. Think what a tin god a teacher really is. He is the center of the picture; he commands and he is obeyed; he metes out justice; he does nearly all the talking. In the free school, the power element is eliminated. In Summerhill, there is no chance of a teacher’s showing off his ego. He cannot compete with the more vocal egoism of the children. Thus, instead of respecting me, the children often call me a fool or a silly ass. Generally, these are terms of endearment. In a free school, the love element becomes the important one. The words used are secondary.

A boy comes to Summerhill from a more or less strict, anxious home. He is allowed freedom to do what he likes. No one criticizes him. No one tells him to mind his manners. No one asks him to be seen and not heard. The school is naturally a paradise to a boy. For paradise to a boy is a place where he can express his whole ego. His delight in being free to express himself soon becomes linked up with me. I am the man who allows him to be free. I am the Daddy that Daddy should have been. The boy is not really loving me. A child does not love-he just wants to be loved. His unspoken thought is: I am happy here. Old Neill is a pretty decent guy. He never butts in and all that. He must be very fond of me or he would order me about.

Vacation comes. He goes home. At home, he borrows father’s searchlight, and no doubt leaves it lying on the piano. Father protests. The boy realizes that home is not a free place. One boy often said to me, “My people aren’t up to date, you know. I’m not free at home like I am here. When I go home, I’m going to teach my father and mother.” I suppose he carried out his threat, for he was sent to another school.

Many of my pupils suffer badly from “relationitis.” At present, I have a strong desire to have an acrimonious talk with the following relatives of my pupils: two grandfathers (religious), four aunts (religious and prudish), two uncles (irreligious and moralizing). I sternly forbade the parents of one of my boys to allow him to visit his hellfire-loving grandfather, but they answered that it would be impossible to take such a drastic step. Woe to the boy!

At a free school, the child is safe from relatives. Nowadays, I warn them off. Two years ago, an uncle came and took his nephew, aged nine, for a stroll. The boy came back and began to throw bread about the dining room. “Your outing seems to have upset you,” I said. “What did your uncle talk about?”

“Oh,” he said lightly, “he talked about God all the time, God and the Bible.”

“Didn’t happen to quote the text about casting your bread upon the waters, did he?” I asked, and he began laughing. Incidentally, he gave up bread throwing. When that uncle returns here, his nephew will simply be “temporarily unavailable.”

In general, though, I cannot complain about most parents of my pupils. We get along splendidly together. Most of them are with me all the way. One or two timorously doubt, but continue to trust. I always tell the parents quite frankly what my methods are. I always tell them to take it or leave it. The ones who are with me all the way have no occasion to be jealous. The children feel just as free at home as at school, and they like going home.

Pupils whose parents do not completely believe in Summerhill do not want to go home for holidays. The parents demand too much of them. They do not realize that a child of eight is interested mainly in himself. He has no social sense no real idea of duty. At Summerhill, he is living out his selfishness and he will get rid of it by expressing it. One day he will become racial, because his respect for the rights and opinions of others will modify his selfishness. From the child’s point of view, glib agreement between school and home is disastrous. He begins to have a conflict: Which is right, home or school? It is essential for a child’s growth and happiness that home and school should have a single purpose, a combined point of view.

One of the chief causes of disagreement between parent and teacher, I find, is jealousy. A girl pupil of fifteen said to me, “If I want to make Daddy roaring mad, I just say to him, ‘Mr. Neill says so-and-so!”‘ Anxious parents are often jealous of any teacher that a child loves. That is natural. Children are, after all possessions; they are property; they are a part of the parent’s ego.

The teacher, too is equally and frailly human. Many teachers have no children of their own; and so unconsciously they adopt their pupils. They strive, without realizing what they are doing to steal the child from the parents. It is really necessary that a teacher be analyzed. Analysis is no panacea for all ills; it has a limited scope, but it clears the ground. I think that the chief merit of analysis is that it makes one understand others more easily, makes one more charitable. For this reason alone, I strongly recommend it for teachers; for after all, their work is to understand others. The analyzed teacher will cheerfully face his own attitude to children, and by facing it, improve it.

If a home yields fears and conflicts, it is a bad home. A child who has been pushed ahead too fast by his anxious parents is likely to become resentful. Unconsciously, he is determined that his parents shall not win. A child who has not been reared with anxiety and conflict will meet life in the spirit of adventure.

Parental Awareness

Being aware means being free from prejudices, from infantile attitudes-rather, as free as possible, for who can ever get free of early conditionings? Awareness implies getting under the surface of things, discounting the superficial. Because of their emotional attachment this is not easy for parents. ‘What a mess I have made of my kids!’, is the cry in scores of letters I have received. The teacher, not handicapped by a strong emotional attachment to his pupils, has a far better chance than the parent to practice constant awareness in guiding the child to freedom.

Many a time I have had to write to a father that his problem son didn’t stand a chance unless he, the father, changed some of his methods I have had to point out, for instance, that it is an impossible situation wherein Tommy is free to smoke at Summerhill while he gets a beating for smoking at home. For smoking substitutes bathing, washing, not learning, swearing and so on.

I have never put a child against his home. It was freedom that did the job, and of course, the unaware home simply could not take the challenge, could not understand the workings of freedom.

I would like to illustrate the wrong kind of parent-child relationship with several examples. The children I am going to write about are not abnormal in any way. They are simply victims of an environment in which there is no awareness of the child’s real needs.

There is Mildred. When she returns after every vacation, she is spiteful, quarrelsome, and dishonest; she bangs doors, complains about her room, complains about her bed, and so on. It takes more than half a term before she is once again easy to live with. She has spent her vacation nagging and being nagged by her mother, a woman who married the wrong man. All the school freedom in the world cannot give that child lasting contentment. As a matter of fact; an exceptionally bad vacation at home is followed up by petty thievery at school. Making her conscious of the situation does not change the home environment of unawareness, of hate, of constant interference with her life. Even at Summerhill, a child sometimes cannot get away from the home influence--the bad home influence that has no values, no knowledge of what a child thinks and feels. Alas! One cannot easily teach people values.

Johnny, aged eight, returns to school with a nasty look. He teases and bullies weaker children. His mother believes in Summerhill, but his father is a disciplinarian. The boy must jump to his father’s command, and the child tells me that he is sometimes slapped. What can be done about him? I don’t know.

I write to a father, “It is fatal for you to criticize your boy in any way. Do not rage at him. Above all, never punish him.” When the boy goes home on vacation, his father meets him at the station. And the first thing he says to the boy is, “Keep your head up, man. Don’t slouch!”

Peter’s mother promised to give him a penny every morning that his bed was dry. I countered by offering him three cents every time he wet the bed. But in order to prevent a conflict between the mother and myself in the child’s mind, I persuaded her to cut out her reward before I began mine. Now Peter more often wets the bed at home than he does at school. One element in his neurosis is that he wants to remain a baby; he is jealous of his baby brother. He vaguely senses that his mother is trying to cure him. What I am trying to do is to show him that wetting the bed doesn’t matter a bit. In short, my three cents reward is encouraging him to remain a baby until he has lived it all out and he is ready to give it up naturally. A habit means that something has not been lived out. To discipline or bribe it out of existence means making the child feel guilty and giving him hateful morals. It is better to wet the bed than to become a moral prig.

Little Jimmy returns after a vacation saying, “I’m not going to skip a single lesson this term.” His parents have been urging him to pass his high-school entrance exams. He goes to lessons for a week and then he doesn’t show up at classes for a month. Another proof that mere talking is always useless. Worse than that, talk can be hampering.

As I said, these cases are not problem children at all. Under a rational environment and with parental understanding, these youngsters would be normal children.

I once had a problem boy who had suffered under the wrong teaching methods, and I told his mother that she must undo the mischief. She promised she would. She brought him back after the summer vacation, and I said, “Well, did you take off the prohibition?”

“Yes,” she said, “I did.”

“Good! What did you say to him?”

“I said, ‘Playing with your penis is not wrong, but it is a silly thing to do.’”

She took off one prohibition and she put on another. And of course, the poor boy continued to be antisocial, dishonest, hateful, and full of anxiety.

My case against the parent is that he will not learn. Most of my work seems to consist of correcting parental mistakes. I feel both sympathy and admiration for the parents who honestly see the mistakes they have made in the past and who try to learn how best to treat their child. But other parents, strangely enough, would rather stick to a code that is useless and dangerous than to try to adapt themselves to the child. Even stranger, they seem to be jealous of the child’s love for me.

The children do not love me so much as they love my non-interference in their affairs. I am the father they daydreamed about when their real father shouted, “Stop that row!” I never demand good manners nor polite language. I never ask if faces have been washed. I never ask for obedience or respect or honor. In short, I treat children with the dignity that adults expect to be treated with. I realize, after all, that there can be no real competition between the father and me. His work is to earn an income for his family. My work is to study children and to give all my time and interest to children. If parents refuse to study child psychology in order to become more aware of their children’s development they must expect to be left behind. And parents are left behind.

I have had a parent write to a child in my school, “If you can’t spell better than you do, I’d rather you not write me.” That was written to a girl of whom we were not quite sure whether she was mentally defective or not!

More than once I have had to roar at a complaining parent, “Your boy is a thief, a bed-wetter. He is antisocial, unhappy, and inferior. And you come to me and grouse because he met you at the station with a dirty face and dirty hands!” I am a man slow to wrath, but when I meet a father or mother who will not or cannot acquire a sense of values about what is important and what is trifling in a child’s behavior, I get angry. Perhaps that is why I am thought to be anti-parent. On the other hand, what a joy it is when a mother comes for a visit, meets her muddy, tattered child in the garden, beams, and says to me, “Isn’t he looking well and happy?”

Yet, I know how difficult it is. We all have our own standards of values and we measure others by our personal yardstick. Possibly I should apologize for being a man who is fanatic about children, impatient of parents who do not see children with my eyes. But if I did apologize, I would be a hypocrite. The truth is that I know I am right about values-as far as children are concerned.

The parent who genuinely wants to change his poor relationship with his child can start by asking himself certain down- to-earth questions. I can think of a score of pertinent questions. Am I angry with my child because I had a row with my husband (or wife) this morning? Is it because our intercourse last night did not give me enough pleasure? Or because the woman next door says I spoil my brat? Or because my marriage is a failure? Or because the boss told me off at the office? It can help very much to ask oneself questions like these.

The really deep questions, the lifetime-conditioned ones, alas, am beyond consciousness. It is very unlikely that an irate father will pause and ask himself this complicated question: Am I angry with my son for swearing because I was brought up strictly, with whippings and moral lectures, with fear of God, with respect of meaningless social conventions, with intense sexual repression? The answer would mean a degree of self-analysis that is beyond the capability of most of us. Too bad, for that answer would save many a child from neurosis and unhappiness.

The biblical phrase about visiting the iniquities of the fathers on the children has been understood in its physical context for generations. And even the uneducated can learn the moral of Ibsen’s Ghosts, where the son is ruined because of the syphilis of the father. What is not understood is the much more frequent ruination of the children by the psychological sins of the fathers. For the child, there can be only one escape from this destructive cycle of character distortion--early guidance toward self- regulation on the part of the aware parent.

It must be emphasized that self-regulation demands more giving than a set system of rules does. The parents will have sacrificed more of their time and self-interest for at least two years. They must not play a game to gain the baby’s love or gratitude. They must not look on baby as a showpiece to give smiles and perform tricks when relatives come visiting. Self-regulation implies much parental selflessness. I emphasize this aspect because I have seen young couples who thought that they were using self-regulation when they were making the baby adapt himself to their own convenience, trying to make the child accept a bedtime that fitted in with their desire to go to the movies of an evening. Or later on, giving the child soft, noiseless toys so that Daddy won’t be disturbed during his forty winks.

“But stop,” cries the parent, “you can’t do that to us! We have our own rights in life!” I say no, not during the first two years --or maybe four years of a child’s life. The first years must be years of the most careful watchfulness, because the whole of the surroundings are against self-regulation, and one is forced to fight for a child with a conscious intensity.

I have several other bits of advice for parents who are in earnest about giving their children a good start toward self- regulation and freedom.

Parking a baby in a baby carriage in the garden, perhaps for hours at a time, is a dangerous practice. No one can know what agonizing feelings of fear and loneliness a baby can experience on waking up suddenly to find himself alone in a strange place. Those who have heard a baby’s screams on such occasions have some idea of the cruelty of this stupid custom.

If you want your child to grow up without being neurotic, you must not-dare not--stand aloof from him. You must play with him, not only at his games, but play with him in the sense that you are a child too, able to enter into his life and accept his interests. If you have any silly dignity, you will not be able to do this.

It is always better, if possible, for grandparents to live separately-and not with the children. What usually happens is that the grandparents insist on laying down the law about the up bringing of children, or that the grandparents spoil them by seeing only the good or the bad in them. In wrong homes the children have four bosses instead of two. Even in good homes there is a strain because most of the time the grandparents keep trying to bring in their own antiquated views on childhood. Grandparents are often inclined to spoil a child by a too possessive love. This usually happens when Grandma has no real interest in life after her own family has grown. The third generation gives her a chance to begin her job anew. Under the notion that her daughter or daughter-in-law is incompetent as a mother, Grandma takes over, and the child is pulled both ways --and is apt to withdraw from both sides. To a child, squabbling means a loveless home, whether it be between Mother and Granny or between man and wife. And even if the squabbling is subtly hidden from the child, he is never deceived. He feels, without being conscious of it, that there is no love in his house.

The question of school may also be difficult. Your wife may wish to send the child to a coed progressive school, and you may wish to send the child to a public school. There may be a clash. Possibly the worst result may occur if either you or your wife is a Roman Catholic. I have no advice to offer here. Ideological or religious gulfs are too often unbridgeable. I can only say that some of my most difficult pupils were the result of the parents’ differences of opinion on schools. A boy whose father was against Summerhill but gave way for the sake of peace never made substantial progress here because he knew his father really disapproved. It is a tragic situation for any child to be in. He never finds any security of tenure, fearing that any day his father will decide to transfer him to a disciplined school.

However some antagonism between parent and teacher is to be expected. Teachers are aware of this, and some of them work hard in order to bring the staff and parents into closer contact through parent-teacher meetings in the school. Excellent! It should be done everywhere. Teachers should realize that they can never be as important an influence on children as the parents are. That is why it is hopeless to try to cure a problem child when the home retains the atmosphere that made the child a problem.

Parents must face the fact that, sooner or later, it is necessary for children to break away from them. Naturally I do not mean that children should leave their parents and never see them again. I man breaking away psychically; ridding themselves of the infant’s dependence on home. It is natural for a mother to try to keep her children dependent on her. I know many homes where a daughter has remained at home to comfort her parents in their old age. In most of the cases, I realize, the home is an unhappy one.

One part of the daughter’s psyche is urging her to go out into the world and live her own life. The other part, the dutiful part, compels her to remain with her parents. She must always have an inner conflict, and this conflict usually shows itself in irritation: Of course, I love mother, but she is so tiresome at times!

Today, thousands of women have the dullest jobs on earth - preparing meals, doing dishes, washing clothes, ironing, dusting. They are unpaid housekeepers, and their lives are drab. When the family leaves the nest, the mother’s job is finished. The nest from which the fledglings have flown is a lonely nest, and the mother should be sympathized with rather than condemned. Her maternal tendency is to keep her job as long as possible--even though she may unintentionally cause her child suffering in the process. All this should point to the obvious fact that every married woman should have a trade or profession that she can take up again once her maternal responsibilities are over.

The parent is God, and a jealous God. The parent has the legal right to say, I shall mold my child thus! A mother and father can beat their child, terrorize him, make his life miserable. The law can interfere only if too much bodily damage is done. It cannot interfere at all, however, no matter how much psychical damage is done. The tragedy is that the parent believes that he is always acting for the best.

Humanity’s great hope is that parents will act for the best, if they have awareness and are on the side of the child in his development toward freedom in work, and knowledge, and love. If this book has helped even one parent to realize the tremendous influence for good or evil that a parent exerts, it will not have been written in vain.

SEVEN

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 606