The Free Child - AS Neill - THE UNFREE CHILD

His name is Legion. He lives in every corner of the world. He lives in our town, round the first corner; he sits at a dull desk in a million barrack schools, and later at a duller desk in office and shop. He is docile, prone to obedience to authority, fearful of criticism and almost fanatical in his desire to be normal, conventional, correct. He accepts what he has been taught, and he hands all his complexes and fears and frustrations on to his children. I recently said to an expupil of one of our most famous Public Schools:
"How many boys from your school later come to challenge the whole system?" Without pausing to think he answered:
"I should guess about 3%."

Psychologists have contended that most of the psychic damage to a child has been done in the first five years of its life. It is possibly nearer the truth to say that the first five months, or weeks or perhaps minutes can do damage that will last a lifetime. Unfreedom begins with birth, nay, it begins long before birth. If a repressed woman with a rigid body bears a child, who can say what effect the maternal rigidity has on the newborn baby?

Reich and his fellow workers are at present studying this aspect, and their final report should be of the greatest value to all those who deal with children. It may be no exaggeration to say that all children in our civilisation are born in a lifedisapproving atmosphere. A woman complained because my daughter bathed in the sea naked. Zoë was then one year old. This question of bathing sums up tersely the whole antilife attitude of society. We all know the irritation arising from trying to undress on the beach without exposing our socalled private parts. No child can feel himself a free person when the great function of sex is made something shameful, to be hidden by law. Parents of selfregulated children know the difficulty of explaining to a child of three or four why he or she must wear a bathing costumd in a public place.

One feels platitudinous today when one says that the sex taboo is the root evil in the suppression of children; it has been said so often, said too often without being believed. I do not narrow the word sex down to genital sex; it is likely that the child at the breast feels unhappy if his mother disapproves of any or every part of her own body. We should use the word Pleasure instead of the word Sex. The baby timetablefeeding advocates are basically antipleasure; they want the child to be disciplined in feeding because nontimetablefeeding suggests orgastic pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalisation; the deep motive is to mould the child into a disciplined realist who will put duty before pleasure.

But to get away from theorising, let us consider the life of an imaginary Grammar School boy, John Smith, lower middle class. His parents are Church of England who go to church about once a year, but send their family to Sunday School. The parents had married quite rightly because of mutual sex attraction; they had to marry because in their milieu one could not live sexually unless when respectable, that is married. As so often happens the sex attraction was not enough, and differences of temperament made the home a strained place, with occasional loudvoiced arguments between the parents.

There were many tender moments too, but little John took them for granted, whereas the loud quarrels hit him in the region of the solar plexus, and he cried and got spanked for crying for nothing. From the first he was conditioned. Timetable feeding gave him much frustration when he was hungry and the clock said his feeding time was still an hour away. He was wrapped up in too many clothes, too tightly; he found that he could not kick out as freely as he wanted to do. He found that he was limited in certain directions. Frustration in feeding naturally made him suck his thumb, but the family doctor said that he must not be allowed to form bad habits, and mamma was ordered to tie up his arms in pasteboard sleeves.

His natural functions were left alone during the nappy period, but when he began to crawl and perform on the floor, words like Naughty and Dirty began to float about the house, and a grim beginning was made in teaching him to be house clean. Before this his hand had been taken away every time it touched his genitals, and he soon came to associate the genital Verbot with the analfa~ces acquired disgust, and thus, years later when he became a commercial traveller, his story repertoire consisted of a balanced number of sex and watercloset jokes.

Much of his training was conditioned by relatives and neighbours. Mother and father were most anxious to be correct, to do the proper thing, so that when relatives or nextdoor neighbours came, John had to show himself as a welltrained child. He had to say "Thank You" when Auntie gave him a chocolate; he had to be most careful about his table manners, and especially he had to refrain from speaking when adults were speaking. His abominable Sunday Clothes were a concession to neighbours. With this training in the acceptance of respectability went an involved system of lying, a system he was usually unaware of consciously.

The lying began early in his life. He was told that God does not love naughty boys who say Damn, that the policeman would fetch him if he wandered along the train corridor when he was three. All his curiosity about the origins of life were met with clumsy lies, lies so effective that his conscious curiosity about life and birth disappeared. The lies about life became combined with fears when at the age of five his mother found him having genital play with his sister of four and the girl from next door. The severe spanking that followed (father added to it when he came home from work) conveyed to John for ever the lesson that sex is filthy and sinful, something one must not even think of. Poor John had to bottle up his interest in sex until he came to puberty and could guffaw in the local cinema when a woman character said she was three months gone.

When he was fifteen he fell in love with Mary Brown and they sat in the cinema holding surreptitious hands . . . until the headmaster called them into his sanctum and told them sternly that if he found them going to the cinema together again ...
Intellectually John's career was normal. He learned easily, and thus escaped the sneers and punishment a stupid teacher might have given him. He left school with a smattering of mostly useless knowledge and a culture that was easily satisfied with the cheap picture press, the trite Hollywood film, the mechanical crime library. The name Milton to John was associated with a mouth wash, and Beethoven and Bach were intrusive guys who got in the way when you were tuning in to Sambo Wambo and His Bix Beiderbecke Band. I hasten to say that it does not matter to one's happiness and creation in life whether one loves Beethoven or Hot Jazz. Schools would have more success if they included jazz in the curriculum and left out Beethoven. In my own school three boys, inspired by jazz bands, took up instruments; two bought clarinets, one a trumpet. On leaving school they all went to study at the Royal Academy of Music, and today they are all playing in bands or orchestras which play dassical music only.

John never had enough play in his life. The school playground was a concrete square, far too small for games, and his "breaks" from lessons were never nearly long enough. His home lessons and his running family messages limited his play at home. Hence he never developed his imagination, his phantasy. True he was given woodwork lessons in his school, and made quite good dovetail joints, but he was never allowed to make what his play instinct would have impelled him to make, so that when he left school he never touched a plane or a chisel again. Recently, visiting a big school in the North, I watched boys making wood joints and hammering copper trays and bowls. I asked the teacher: "How many of these boys will keep this up as a hobby later on?" He sighed and answered: Not one, no not one." The reason being that children do not work; they play, and there is no play in a mitred joint.

John Smith's remote cousin Reginald SmithSmythe went to a Public School, but his development in essentials was that of poor John. He had the same acceptance of the secondrate in life, the same negation of love and joy. Reginald, owing to the fact that his parents used parental subetitutes.tutors, nurses, governessesmay have escaped some of the more stupid Verbots and taboos, but the acceptance of the status quo in life along with its concomitant fear of anything new put Reggie in the same boat with John.

Are these pictures of John and Reginald onesided caricatures or not? Not exactly caricatures, but I have not given the complete picture. I have left out the warm humanity of both, a humanity that survives the most evil charactermoulding. The Smiths and the Smythes of life are in the main decent, friendly folk, full at the same time of childish faiths and superstitions and childlike trust and loyalties. They and their fellows make up the body of John Citizen who make laws and demand humaneness; they are the people who decree that animals must be killed humanely, that pets must be properly cared for, but they break down when they come to vermin, and they allow, and use without conscience, cruel poisons that burn rats' guts out. And they break down when it comes to man's inhumanity to man; they accept a cruel, unChristian criminal code without a thought, and they accept the kill1mg of other men in war as a natural phenomenon.

I hear my old friend Colonel Blimp snort and thunder:
"Damme, sir, and why rot? Civilisation would be all right if you interfering discontents did not stir up innocent youth against its betters, the men who made the Empire, who invented and traded and uplifted the heathen parts of the world." And to some extent he is right. Our characterforming method has made a great success of material things; it has given us a high standard of living. True it has given miserable inequalities between rich and poor, but these are gradually breaking down or rather levelling up (or down ?). Many will say with the Communists that when the economic question is settled, life will be full and satisfying and free. For myself I cannot believe this. The little we have seen of economic freedom has not been encouraging. The aristocracy of England for generations were economically free, but their products were not of great merit. The Communist argument that this was because they felt themselves guilty of exploitation of the workers seems to me a feeble one. The economic freedom that makes an American electric kitchen does not lead to any greater happiness or wisdom; all it does is to allow more comfort, and this soon becomes accepted automatically and loses its emotional value.

I seem to have been painting a black picture of the result of John Smith's forced education, but who can call the world picture white or even grey? Not many will sit down and question established things. In school questioniuig was not allowed to anyone except the teacher; at home children were seen and not heard. If we feel like questioning today we can postulate a few awkward questions. Why does man seem to have many more diseases than animals have? Why does man hate and kill in war when animals do not? Why does cancer increase and why are millions spent on the mechanistic cancer cure research? Why so many suicides? So many insane sex crimes? Why the projected hate that is in anti Semitism? Why negro hating and lynching? Why gossip and backbiting and jealousy and envy and spite? Why the continuance of religions that have long ago lost their love and hope and charity? Why is sex an obscene leering joke? Why is being bastard a social disgrace? Why, a thousand whys about our vaunted state of civilised eminence?

I ask these questions because I am by profession a dominie, that is one who deals with the young. I ask them because the questions so often asked by teachers are the unimportant ones, the ones about school subjects. I ask what earthly good can come out of discussions about Maths or French or History or what not, when these subjects don't matter a jot in the larger question of life's natural fulfilment? I lecture to a body of teachers. I commence by saying that I am not going to speak about school subjects or discipline or classes. For an hour I am listened to in rapt silence, and after the sincere applause my chairman announces that I am ready to answer questions.

To complete the portrait of John Smith I ought to give a short sketch of the life of his sister Mary, short because, by and large, the environment in its repressive aspect is that of her brother. She has, however, handicaps that John does not have. In a patriarchal society she is a definite inferior, and she is trained to know it. She has to do house chores when her brother reads or plays; she soon learns that when she gets a job she will get less pay than a man gets. If she stems from the Smith Smythe branch of the family she has to accept the law of inheritance that gives her younger brother the title and lands and fortune. At a dance Mary has to wait until some youth asks her to dance, and her Swedish sister must not drink her wine at table until some man nods to her and raises his glass, but then the Swedish father is too often a terrifying person; among the many Swedish pupils I have had in my time, only one or two were not afraid of their fathers; the girl pupils were completely under their stern fathers' thumbs.

Mary does not as a rule rebel against her inferior status in a manmade society. Man sees that she has compensations, tawdry as they mostly are. She is the focus of good manners; she is treated with deference; man will stand in her presence if she i~ not seated, and in Britain many men give up their tuppenny seat in a tram to a standing but not their firstclass train seat to a woman standing in the corridor. We ask a woman's permission to smoke; we ask her if she will graciously marry us; we inibtly teach her that one of her chief functions is to look as lovely as possible, so that many more millions are spent m~ dress and cosmetics than on books and schools.

In the sex sphere Mary is as ignorant, as repressed as her brother. In a patriarchal society the menfolk have decreed that their women must be pure, virginal, innocent, and it is not Mary's fault that she has grown up in the sincere belief that women have purer minds than men. In some almost mystical way her menfolk have made her think and feel that her function in life is reproduction, and that sexual pleasure is man's province. Some men actually believe that, and I requote the incident in which the father of a family expressed surprise in a pub that the Almighty hadn't given women the gift of having orgasms. Mary's grandmother, and probably her mother, too, were not supposed to have any sex until the right man came along and aroused the sleeping beauty. Mary has got away from that phase, but not so far away as we want to believe. Her love life is ruled by fear of pregnancy, for she realises that an illegitimate child will very likely spoil her chance of getting a man, or rat her being possessed and kept by a man. The invention of contraceptives must in the long run lead to a new sex morality, seeing that fear of consequences was the strongest factor in sex morality. The number of young people today who have a love life before marriage could not possibly have done so in my young days. Love to be free must feel itself safe, but here I must take up the vexed question of "free love ".

"Free love" has a sinister meaning because it describes sex that is neurotic; it means promiscuous sex which is always unhappy and shameful. It is the direct result of repression, and in a free people would not exist.

Neither John nor his sister have any facilities for loving in the true sense. Parents will not allow sons or daughters to live in sin, as they call it, in the house, so that love has to seek damp woods or parks or even stone closes in cities. Thus everything is loaded heavily against our young folk. Circumstances compel them to convert what should be lovely and joyful into something sinister and sinful, into smut, leers, shameful laughter. Our John will probably never become a sex criminal but the taboos and fears that fashioned his character are those that produce the perverts who rape and strangle small girls in parks, the perverts who torture Jews or Negroes. If I remember rightly, Malinovski found no rape nor sex crime in the Trobriand Islands where sex was not repressed and evil.

One of the big tasks of today and tomorrow is the investigation of repressed sexual energy and its relation to human sickness. Our John Smith may die of kidney trouble and Mary may die of cancer, and neither will wonder whether their narrow, tied emotional lives have any connection with their illnesses. So far as I know the only people working on this line of enquiry are the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, Maine, U.S.A. The Foundation's own literature should be read by those who are interested in studying, not psychology, not the body, but the whole personality, psyche and soma.