The Free Child - AS Neill

This is my sixteenth book. Now that I am in my seventieth year I cannot write many more. I feel that I shall not write another book about education, for I have little new to say. Some may say I have already said too damn much, and perhaps I have, yet I have something in my favour; I have not spent the last forty years writing down theories about children; most of what I have written has been based on observing children, living with them. True I had inspirations from Freud and Reich and Homer Lane and others, but gradually I have found that I have tended to drop theories when the test of reality made them inadequate. In another realm I certainly did so. I was once tempted to lean towards Communism when its attitude to children was like my own, but slowly I discovered that Communism had no more use for freedom for children than had Colonel Blimp. I used to call myself a Socialist and anathematised private enterprise... until it dawned on me that Socialism, while killing the private enterprise of the profiteer, would at the same time slowly strangle the private enterprise of my own work. Hence today I have no politics at all, for I cannot see the future happiness of mankind resulting from any political system.

I have had a good life, a full life, I hope a useful life. 1 have made many friends and, so far as I know, not half a dozen enemies. It is a queer job that of an author, rather like broadcasting, sending out some sort of a message to people one does not see, people one cannot count. My public has been a special one. What might be called the official public knows me not. The B.B.C. would never think of inviting me to broadcast on education; no university, my own of Edinburgh included, would think of offering me an honorary degree; when I lecture to Oxford and Cambridge students no professor, no don comes to hear me. And, confound it, I think I am rather proud of these facts, feeling that to be acknowledged by the officials would suggest that I was out of date.

At one time I resented the fact that The Times would never publish any letter I sent in, but today I feel that their refusal is a compliment. I am not claiming that I have got away from snobbery or from the wish for recognition, yet age brings changes, especially changes in values. Recently I lectured to seven hundred Swedes, packing a hall built for six hundred, and I had no feeling of elation or conceit; I thought I was really indifferent until I asked myself the question: "How would I have felt if the audience had consisted of ten ?" The answer being . . damned annoyed, so that if positive pride is lacking negative chagrin is not. Ambition dies with age. My ambitions today are small ones; to play better golf, to make a good job spraying my car, and, not having views about the future of children, I have no conscious ambition for my daughter. Recognition is a different matter. I do not like to see a book with the title ofsay The History of Progressive Schools, a book that ignores my work. I have never met anyone who honestly was indifferent to recognition. My first wife's sister, Henry Handel Richardson, the brilliant Australian novelist, used to shrink from publicity, but I always noticed how her eyes sparkled with pleasure when she read an appreciative review of her work.
There is a comical aspect about age. For years I have been trying to reach the young students, teachers, parents, seeing age as a brake on progress. Now that I am old, one of the Old Men I have preached against so long, I feel different. Why, when last month I talked to three hundred students in Cambridge I felt myself the youngest person in the hail. I did. I said to them: "Why do you need an old man like me to come and tell you about freedom ?" So that nowadays I do not think in terms of youth and age; I feel that years have little to do with it; I know lads of twenty who are ninety, men of sixty who are twenty. My doctor brother at seventy two cycles seventy miles a day when on vacation, but this by the way; I am thinking in terms of freshness, enthusiasm, of lack of conservatism, of deadness, of pessimism.

Age lessens fear. I have not the dread of death that I had when in my teens. Some fear there must be in all lives, unless life has been so miserable that one takes one's own life to escape from it. But it also lessens courage. Years ago I could easily tell a boy who threatened to jump from a high window if he did not get his own way, to go im and jump. I am not so sure I could do so today. But then what is courage? I am afraid when in an aeroplane, kit can sit in a room infected with typhoid or polio withait fear, perhaps not a good comparison, for if a plane crashes one has no chance, whereas one has a very good dmance of not catching polio. I dwell on this question of fear partly because many have said and written that I have been a brave man to pioneer in education. I never could see that because I never could see any danger to face. They called it moral courage, a kind of courage that has never been considered of much value; most men would prefer to be praised for an act of courage in war, than lauded for boldly walking down Piccadilly in full evening dress and brown shoes, or more seriously, for holding a torch in an unpopular cause, like a white man supporting negroes in the Southern States. Moral courage is misnamed; it should be faith courage, that which springs from belief in what erie is doing. A socalled moral coward is one who loses his faith, a doubter, a sitter on the fence. And we are all moral cowards. We have all suffered from the misery of bad conscience when the cock crew after our denials. I mice travelled to Scotland with a stranger who was reading one of my books. We got into conversation and he began to call the book everything bad and I agreed with him, not entirely because of moral cowardice in hiding from him my identity, but also because I thought much d his criticism just. I went into a secondhand bookshop to ask if they had a copy of one of my early books.

"Yes," Jo said the shopkeeper, "we have a copy of A Dominie's Log, saw it only yesterday." He hunted and could not find it, muttering : "That's the worst of insignificant authors; their books get astray. If you leave your name and address I'll let you know if I find it."
"Thanks," I said quickly, "I'll look in again next week." No morally courageous man would have dodged like that.
They say that age mellows. I suppose it does. My father was a stern dominie when young, and in old age a goodtempered, lovable old man. But I have seen the opposite the irascible, disagreeable, backbiting old man or woman, apparently jealous of youth and hating it for its liveliness and movement. In the main old people tend to be like my father, amiable, contented, more openminded than they were when young. I have more than once seen that, when a girl has an illegitimate child, the grandparents are more tolerant and sympathetic than the parents.

In my own case I do not know if I have mellowed or not. I suffer fools less gladly than I used to do, am more irritated by boring conversations, and less interested in people's personal histories, but then I've had far too many imposed on me these last thirty years. I also find less interest in things, and seldom want to buy anything; I haven't looked in a clothes shop window for years. And even my beloved tool shops in Euston Road do not attract nowadays. So with making. Today I should hesitate to take a disc of brass to make a tray, thinking that when finished it has no value even to me. On the other hand I can paint a room with Plastilac Emulsion paint with enthusiasm, just as I enjoyed spraying my car for 30 shillings after getting a quotation of £40... but that is partly because I am a Scot.
I hope the reader is not being bored by all this personal material. I suppose that, after a life largely devoted to others, a life of listening to a thousand or two problem children and parents, I feel like being egocentric at last.

Moreover it may be good to write about old age if only to show how it has affected my work. If I have now reached the stage when children's noise tires me more than it used to, I cannot say that age has brought me impatience. I can still see a child do all the wrong things, live out all the old complexes, knowing that in good time the child will be a good citizen. I can still be keen on children's acting, especially in my Spontaneous Acting class once a week. Indeed my chief and perhaps only virtue is patience. In my therapy with Reich he kept telling me that I was repressing my hate, trying to be too much of a Christlike person. It may be, but I find it difficult to hate. They say that if you cannot hate you cannot love. Maybe. I have never been able to give out what might be called personal love to children, and certainly never sentimental love. The word sentimental is difficult of definition; I call it giving a swan emotion to a goose. Thus I have never had favourites in the school. Sure I have liked some children better than others, yet have always managed to keep from betraying it. Possibly the success of Summerhill has been in part due to the feeling that the children had that they were all Jock Tamson's bairns, all treated alike and treated with respect. I fear the existence in any school of a sentimental attitude to the pupils; it is so easy to make your geese swans, to see a Picasso in a child who can splash colour about.
It is all a matter of awareness. Without awareness you cannot be objective. Put it this way: if a man does not know he has a strong mother complex he will have a blind eye to mother complexes in his pupils. 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; in dealing with children, getting down to depth psychology. It implies seeking deep motives for behaviour. A boy is antisocial, why? Symptoms obtrude and irritate; he is a bully, perhaps a thief, perhaps a sadist.

The teacher's irritation may make him storm and punish and condemn, but after he has expressed all his irritation the problem remains unsolved. The present wave demanding the revival of flogging will treat only symptoms and in the end effect nothing. Thus the aware teacher will never depend on words. Parents bring a girl who is a liar, a thief, a catty creature; they give a long description of her faults. It will be fatal for the teacher to let the child know that he has been told about her. He must wait until it comes from the girl herself. It is so easy to do the wrong thing here. Years ago I had a bad problem. His parents insisted on his being examined by a psychiatrist, and I took him up to a wellknown doctor in Harley Street. I spent half an hour telling the specialist all about the case, and then we had the boy brought in.
"Mr. Neill tells me you are a very bad boy," said the doctor sternly. That was his version of psychology. I have seen again and again similar false and ignorant approaches to children. "You aren't very big for your age," said a visitor to a boy who had an inferiority complex about his size. Another visitor said to a girl: "Your sister is very clever, isn't she ?" The art of dealing with children might be defined as knowing what not to say.
On the other hand it is necessary to show a child that you are not deceived. To let a child go on stealing your stamps is useless; you must always let him know that you know. What is unpardonable is to say: "Your mother told me you pinch stamps." I am always a little nervous in writing to parents about their children, fearing that they may leave my letter lying around when the child is home for vacation, but fearing more that they will write saying:
"Neill says you are not going to lessons and are being a social nuisance this term." If that happens the child will never have any trust in me, so that usually I tell as little as possible, unless I know the parents are absolutely trustworthy and aware.
To be aware means to have a perspective, to be able to see the wood in spite of trees.

That is not easy for parents because their emotional attachment deflects, and also because they so easily get guilty feelings about their children. "What a mess I have made of my kids !" is the cry in scores of letters I have had. The teacher does not have that handicap if he or she is unemotional about pupils.
The parent teacher relationship is an old bone of contention. I have often been described as the man who puts children against their parents, usually by army men and disciplinarians in general. I must confess that it sometimes looked as if I did. Many a time I have had to write to a father telling him that his son had no chance unless he, the father, changed his methods, saying that it is an impossible situation where Tommy is free to smoke at Summerhill while getting a beating for smoking at home, and for smoking substitute nonwashing, nonlearning, swearing, etc. I never put a child against his home; it was freedom that did the job, and the wrong home could not take it. There is not a single parent today who would suggest that his or her child has been turned against home by Summerhill, because the parents are all going the same way as we are, believing in freedom as much as we do.
However there is often some antagonism between parent and teacher in many schools. Teachers are aware of this and some work hard to bring school staff and parents into contact by having meetings in the school. Excellent; it should be done everywhere. Teachers should realise that they are never so important to 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. I should advocate State Compulsory Education for all parents if I could think of a way of getting enough teachers to educate them. It is really appallng to think that school subjects touch nothing fundamental in children. If care of children were substituted for mathematics, if domestic economy dealt with things more important than cooking pots, if the elements of psychology were linked up with school biology, a new generation of parents would not be so liable to make the dangerous mistakes made by parents today.

I know that one cannot teach awareness, indeed I wonder if one can teach anything that matters. Whence awareness comes I do not know, certainly it does not come from asceticism, introspection, selfanalysis (so impossible to any depth). I think it is a part of altruism, the ability to get outside yourself, to identify yourself with others, and, in some measure, to feel with them. It is a community factor: a man on a desert island might be introspective but he would be unlikely to be aware: aware of his surroundings he naturally would be, but by awareness I mean awareness of people. Every person has some awareness, for otherwise social life would be impossible.
Perhaps the best definition would be consciousness; the aware person has more of his unconscious conscious so to speak. Try as I might I could never make a painting so good, so alive, so imaginative as our Summerhill children paint They paint from their unconscious, paint dynamically, but I am too conscious, bringing my intellect into the art; I have lost for ever the deep drive of childhood. Our great painters are those who have miraculously maintained their childhood ability to see with their... guts is possibly the word. This would suggest that children are more aware than adults; certainly they can be much more deeply absorbed in what they are doing than grownups. They live more fully. Think of the delight children take in bonfires and circuses; think of the ecstasy of expectation the day before, the depth of unhappiness a child has the day after a beanfeast. We old ones lose that and we recapture it only in dreams. Yet children are not aware of people as we are. A boy gets a parcel and he has no interest in knowing who sent it, and if he does know he is unlikely to write a letter of thanks if not prompted by an adult. Life begins with unconsciousness, and its span is one gradual acquisition of consciousness, and then its end is unconsciousness again. Hence the child of ten is largely unconscious, and the man of forty largely conscious, but again consciousness is not necessarily awareness.

The man of forty who spanks his child, who has to make life bearable by nightly visits to the local, is not aware; he has lost the spontaneity of childhood and has found nothing of any depth to replace it.
I may be stressing this word awareness too much. If I am it is because it is elusive; I cannot grasp it intellectually, I can feel it. There is something beyond being aware of cinemas and cosmetics and cricket matches, what, I am trying to puzzle out at the expense of the reader. If I make it concrete I may see it. Wilhelm Reich is much more aware than a Hollywood hero, Bertrand Russell than the average ....... wrong tack, for Reich is completely for the freedom of youth, while Russell wants limitations. Both men have fine minds, and it may be best to rule minds out of the question. We are then left with the solar plexus, and go straight into Reich's great discovery of the link between neurosis and bodily tension. I do not imply that my old friend Bertrand Russell has a stiff stomach, but I can guess that it isn't so loose as Reich's is. Maybe I am now getting somewhere; maybe the person with the greatest awareness has no muscular tensions, but in that case I must be a very unaware man, for my neck is getting like that of the stiffnecked generation. Let me suggest that the person who is aware has synthesised his psyche and soma. There must be something in that. The man with strong sex repressions, the woman with infantile characteristics, they must be unaware, must be incapable of seeing the deep importance of life. The aware man is free, free from inhibitions, from preoccupations, from possessive love, from hate, but, alas, where can we find such a man? All we can seek is the comparatively free man, and then we call him a genius, a vague term that can mean anything. The word is too freely used in our time; we may be right in calling Charlie Chaplin a genius, but it is for posterity to decide who has the right to be classed as such. Definition: A genius is someone who is appreciated a hundred years after his or her death. Only that definition would apply to Guy Fawkes, confound the man! I write this on November 6th.

We older ones recall that in our youth every theatre programme bore the words: Wigs by Clarkson. The story went that, after the first night of Forbes Robertson's Hamlet, Clarkson stood on his stall seat and clapped and cheered long after the general applause had ceased. A friend said: "You seem to have enjoyed the play, Willie." "The greatest Hamlet I've ever seen," cried Clarkson, "Why man, you couldn't see the join." The unaware teacher is always looking for the join, missing the drama of childhood, and by the join I mean arithmetic and grammar and all the rest of the seven deadly subjects.
The word intuition has been suspect these last few years. The old saying was that women had more intuition than men, a saying which is difficult to believe. The Oxford Dictionary definition is: "Immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning; immediate apprehension by sense." I don't know. I am inclined to think a better definition would be: Immediate apprehension by the mind after previous reasoning, or better, after previous experience. I generally do the right thing with a child because my long experience has shown me the right way. No cleverness about it, no special gift, just practice .
with possibly a blind eye for the unessentials, the byproducts. Bill, a new boy has stolen some money from another child. The victim asks me: "Should I charge him in a General Meeting ?" Without thinking I say: "No. Leave it to me." I can reason it out later. Bill is new to freedom, uneasy in his new environment, trying to make himself popular, accepted by his fellows, so that he has been swanking a lot about himself. To make his theft public would be to give him shame, fear, followed perhaps by defiance and an outbreak of antisocial behaviour. Or it might work the other way, for if he had been a gang leader in his last school, proud of his hidden working against the staff, a public accusation might make him crow and show off what a tough guy he was.

Another time a child says: "I am going to charge Mary for pinching my crayons," and I am not interested because Mary has been in the school for two years, only I do not consciously think of that at the time. A new boy of thirteen who has been hating lessons all his life, comes to Summerhill and loafs for weeks, and then, bored, he comes to me and says: "Shall I go to lessons?" I answer:
"Nothing to do with me," because he must find his own inner compulsions. But to another child I might reply:
"Yes, good idea," because her timetable home and school life have made her incapable of deciding anything, and I have to wait until she gradually becomes selfreliant. I do not think of these aspects when I reply. That is not intuition surely. I fancy that sometimes mere guesswork is called intuition. Thirty years ago I was analysing a young woman in Dresden. She had a phobia about being seduced. Being young and bold and unskilled I made a guess. "Who seduced you?" I asked. Tears . . . and then the whole story. That is the same mechanism as appeared in a recent film. "I hate you, oh how I hate you !" cried the woman and went out slamming the door. The man pranced round the room in delight, crying: "She loves me, she loves me !" Not very deep psychology though.

But this preface is running on too long. This book has been written spasmodically since August, 1951. I began it on the top of a mountain in Norway, kilometres from newspapers and post and telephone. There may be some disproportion in it, especially in my observations on my daughter Zoë, for these cover her years from the beginning to the age of six (in November, 1952). I have possibly repeated far too much, and now face the dull task of reading the manuscript in order to cut out the repetitions. I have no idea how other writers feel about reading what they have written, but I dislike the job heartily because the pages refer to yesterday.

I asked a gathering of Norway's leading painters how they viewed their work. All agreed that they did not like the work they had done recently but could look with pleasure on what they had painted some years ago. I cannot compare myself with them, for they are creators, artists, while I am only a recorder, an observer, and art does not enter into my writing any more than it enters into a book on knitting jumpers. It was said that H. G. Wells could not stand his early books, and was annoyed when someone praised Kipps or Mr. Polly, to many people the best books he ever wrote.
Here I am tempted to go on to write about style in literature . . . I did specialise in English at the university, you know . . . but I shall resist the temptation for the good reason that my opinions on style have no value, whereas, I like to think, my opinions on children and education may have.

The Unfree Child