The Free Child
AS Neill
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THE SEMIFREE CHILD
This chapter is going to be a difficult one to write because it will be an effort to sum up my life work in Summerhill School; difficult because one is apt to seek out the good and ignore, or at least soft pedal, the bad.
Summerhill was founded in 1921. I am calling its pupils semifree because
most of them were conditioned before they came to school. Some had been
spanked; most had been trained in the nursery to feed at scheduled times
and to be house clean; some had problem parents; a few had had religion
taught to them, and a goodly number knew the discipline of a State or Prep
or Public School. I cannot think of one who came before say 1943 who had
been selfregulated in the home from birth. Hence the term semifree which
might as well be latefree.
In the realm of book work, handicapped as we were and are by the looming
of examinations, we did not try to ginger up study in any way; on the contrary
we announced that all lessons were optional, and I am glad to say that
in these thirty odd years no child was advised or encouraged to study lessons
of any kind.
We imposed no standard of behaviour or dress or manners or language. All ancient taboos about sex were dismissed, and no religion was brought into the school. The school became known in the more sensational press as the “Do as you please school,” a phrase that betrays the wide public longing for freedom. The sneer in the phrase showed the universal fear of freedom.
We liked to get pupils around the age of five, but economic factors made us take all ages, and we found in the main that the success of any child under freedom depended largely on the age of entering, thus a child who came at five nearly always attended lessons later, made things, was constructive and independent, whereas a boy or girl who entered at twelve or thirteen, coming from a disciplined school, took years to grasp what freedom was, and sometimes stayed away from all lessons for two years or more. So that my report on the school should concentrate on the early corners... but it won’t.
One feature must be made clear from the start. Because the whole idea of a free school was so new I was looked upon largely as a fanatic, a crank, and few parents were willing to risk placing their children with me. Gradually, however, parents in despair about their problem children began to send them to Surnmerhill as a last resort, so that from about 1924 to around 1938 too many pupils were latecomers and bad psychological cases. Incidentally I remark on a discovery I think I made in these days. Like others I had always considered the problem child a bright child with a creative energy that had to come out in an antisocial way because there was no positive way for it to come out. Make him free from inhibitions and discipline, I thought, and he will most likely turn out to be clever, creative, even brilliant sometimes. I was wrong, sadly wrong. Years of living and dealing with all sorts of crooks and swindlers and liars showed me that they were one and all inferiors. I can think of one only who made good in later life. Quite a few were cured of being antisocial and dishonest and they went out to work at the usual jobs, but what I mean by making good was rising to be good scholars or artists or engineers or actresses. When the asocial drive was abolished (by freedom, not by therapy) there seemed to remain only a dead dullness that knew not ambition. This observation seems to fit in with that of some teachers in Borstals and Approved Schools, who tell me that they find the same thing, because the a~cial youth is often subnormal in intelligence . .. and I would add in emotion also.My chief aim will be to show how conditioned children react to a freedom they had never had in their lives. If they became less desirable citizens my thesis, that inhibiting discipline makes bad humans, breaks down, but if they became more social and happier beings, I take it that my criticism of characterbuilding is just. I can answer here and now that every child, problem or normal, became more sincere, more social, more loving. As is widely known Summerhill is a selfgoverning community, that is a society that makes its own laws in regular meetings by show of hands. My vote has the same value as that of a child of five, and if one smiles and says: “But your voice has more value, hasn’t it?” I tell of a recent meeting. Since sweetrationing came in, the spending of pocketmoney has been a bit of a problem, and, as about the only things that can be bought are cigarettes, there has been an increase of smoking especially among the younger boys and girls. I was concerned about this, too concerned when I recall that at least 50% of old pupils who had smoked at the age of ten were nonsmokers. However I got up at a meeting and proposed that no child under sixteen should be allowed to smoke. I argued my case.. . a drug, poisonous, not a real appetite in children but partly swank and an attempt to be grown up. Counter arguments were thrown across the floor of the house. The vote was taken. I was beaten by a large majority
.
The sequel is worth recording. After my defeat a boy of sixteen proposed that no one under twelve should be allowed to smoke. He carried his motion. At the following weekly meeting a boy of twelve proposed the repeal of the new smoking rule, saying: “We are all sitting in the Bogses smoking on the sly just like kids do in a strict school, and I say it is against the whole idea of Summerhill.” His speech was cheered and the meeting repealed the law. And I hope that I have made it clear that my voice is not always more powerful than that of a child.
The question of children’s smoking is of course a controversial one, and here I am not going to argue about it. In the end it generally solves itself. Quite illogically I would forbid strong drink in my school if someone thought that children ought to be allowed to find out the truth about drink for themselves. Our aim was to impose nothing on the child, but in actual practice freedom was limited. No general vote was
invited to decide who should cook and what should be cooked. New staff were appointed without any reference to
or consultation with children or for that matter other sta1~. rough and ready aim was to have freedom to live one’s
The own life so long as one did not disturb the freedom of others... and it was incumbent on us to distinguish freedom from licence, a task that many adults cannot tackle. At a venture I can say that, on the average, children who came to school early, up tosayseven, knew the difference between freedom and licence, while older incomers took a long time to realise where the borderline lay. Sometimes new staff had a licence attitude also. In the school’s begining it was a matter of excitement to get a new pupil: how will she react? Will he go unwashed for weeks? The excitement has long worn off, for today we have a pretty good notion of how any new pupil will react to sudden freedom. He will, say at the age of thirteen, swear a lot, smoke a lot, be cheeky and at the same time afraid of being punished for his impudence; he may go unwashed for days and certainly we will lie abed mornings, even although he thus misses his breakfast which is cleared away at nine. He will seldom show any desire to create, but often a strong one to be destructive. He will lock the bathroom door, that is if he thinks of having a bath, and he will snigger guiltily if he sees a boy or girl run along a passage naked. If he has had a strict father he will look at me with some fear, will soon realise that I am not the stern father type, and possibly begin to hit me playfully. Thirty years of that reaction from moulded, repressed boys and girls havee made me uneasy at taking problem children of that age. Selfsacrifice is especially unwelcome when one is pulling patriarchally spoiled chestnuts out of the fire.
One surprising feature in Public School character formation was its lack of depth in such things as manners. Boys came with beautiful manners and soon dropped them completely, realising no doubt that their insincerity was out of place in Summerhill. Indeed for every child from whatever type of school the gradual dropping of insincerity in voice, manner, action became the norm. Pupils from State schools generally took longest to drop their insincerity and cheek. Free children are never cheeky, nor indeed are semifree ones. Freedom works slowly; it may take several years for a child to understand what it means, and anyone who expects quick results is an incurable optimist. And freedom works best with clever children. I should like to be able to say that, since freedom touches the emotions primarily, all children, intelligent and dull, react equally to it. I cannot say it. One sees the difference in the matter of lessons. Every child under freedom plays most of the time for years, but the bright one, when the time comes, will sit down and tackle the School Certificate Exam, and in a little over two years cover the work that disciplined children take years to cover. The orthodox academic teacher holds that exams will be passed only if discipline keeps the candidate’s nose to the grindstone. Our results prove that that is a fallacy with bright pupils; under freedom it is only the bright ones who can concentrate on intensive study, a most difficult thing to do in a community in which so many counterattractive activities are going on. I know that comparatively poor material passes exams under discipline, but I wonder what becomes of the passers later on. If all schools were free and all lessons were optional, I fancy that children would find their own level, and indifferent scholars who, under discipline, scrape through college or university and become unimaginative teachers and doctors and lawyers, would possibly be good mechanics or bricklayers or policemen. We have found that the boy who cannot or will not learn to read until he is, say fifteen, is always a mechanical boy who later on becomes a good engineer or electrician, but we should not dare dogmatise about girls who never go to lessons . . . especially mathematics and physics. Often they spend much time with needlework and some take up dressmaking and designing later. Anyway it is an absurd curriculum that makes a prospective dresscutter study quadratic equations or Boyle’s Law.
Coming to a part of freedom much more important than lessons, did we find that clever children were better citizens than their duller brothers and sisters? Were they more communally minded, or to put it concretely did the clever ones voluntarily pick up the litter that their less gifted companions ignored? I am sorry to say that they did not. One of the hardtoaccept features of free children is that they do not like gardening or indeed any manual labour that has no play aim. If a general vote gets them to go out and dig potatoes, they go unwillingly because the end result is too far away and has no play component, but the same crowd will spend weeks laboriously digging deep holes and trenches because they want to play some elaborate underground game. For years these holes and tunnels have been nightmares to me even though the older pupils were always helpful in making them safe for the younger daredevils.
Here a parenthesis about the limits of freedom when safety is concerned. It is no joke to be in charge of other people’s children, yet there is an important asset in the commonsense of children. When our school meeting passes a law that no one must bathe in the sea without a lifesaver, there is not a child in the school who will break the law. It is the borderline case that bothers, the climbing of trees for instance. To ban treeclimbing would be wrong and futile, for it is the right of every child to climb trees. A boy of seven recently fell about twentyfour feet on his head and fractured his skull. Luckily he survived. Only a fool in charge of young children would allow unbarred high bedroom windows, or an unprotected nursery fire. Yet too often young enthusiasts for freedom come to my school as visitors, and exclaim at our lack of freedom in locking a lab poison cupboard or prohibiting fooling about with the fire escape. The whole freedom movement is marred and despised because so many freedom fans have not their feet on the ground. One such protested to me recently because I shouted sternly at a problem boy of seven who was kicking my office door. His idea was that I should smile and tolerate the noise until the child should live out his desire to bang doors. It is true that I spent a good few years of my life patiently tolerating the destructive behaviour of problem haters, but as their psychological doctor not their fellow citizen. If my head had been in the clouds I should never have been able to see them to help them.
To return to the children’s reaction to emotional freedom, all, clever and not so clever, gained something that they had not had before, a something that is almost indefinable. Its chief outer sign was a great increase in sincerity and charity, added to a lessening of aggression. I think the Freudians have made a great mistake about aggression; they look for it in every child, every adult, and of course they find it, for it is there all right, put there by charactermoulding and suppression. The Freudians studied the wrong children. When children are not under fear and discipline they are not patently aggressive; only once in thirty years of Summerhill have I seen a fight with bloody noses. The aggressive child, the small bully we always have, and no amount of freedom at school can completely counteract the influence of a bad home. Character acquired in the first months or years of life can be modified by freedom, but it can never be completely changed.
Summerhill experience has nothing to add to the old question whether humanity has a natural proneness to seek a religion. Most of the pupils came from nonbelieving homes, so that they did not have the customary sense of sin and fear of God. So that when I say that free children never appear to want any religion or worship of any kind, it may be that children coming from agnostic or atheistic homes, attending an ordinary State or prep school might not show any desire for religion either. I am inclined to think, however, seeing that sex is the big sin of life, that children who are fairly free from sex fears and shames do not seek any god from whom they can ask pardon or mercy, because they do not feel themselves guilty.
In the previous chapter I tried to paint a picture of the repressed boy, John Smith and his dark, perverse, guilty attitude to sex. I suppose Summerhill has had a few John Smiths, but most pupils have had a better chance than poor John had. Sometimes we would get children whose parents confessed that they had done all the wrong things with them before they heard of freedom in education, so that we had children who had been punished for masturbation or swearing or stealing, and in the school’s problem child era most of the delinquents had been very sadly handled as babies and toddlers. Since the normal child era began some years ago we have tended to get children from enlightened homes, and the more neurotic complexes about sex have not been much in evidence.Coeducation is feared by many parents and teachers because of the danger of pregnancy, and I am told that not a few coed headmasters and headmistresses spend sleepless nights over the worry. It may be comforting news to them that conditioned children, given later freedom to live their own lives, are often incapable of loving, and that applies to both sexes. The news may be comforting to those who fear sex, but to youth in general the news of the inability to love is the news of a great human tragedy. Under coeducation . . . real coeducation, not the kind where boys and girls sit in class together and sleep and live in separate houses, the shameful curiosity element is almost eliminated; there are no Peeping Toms in Summerhill. And any old guilt about masturbation is gradually lost in an atmosphere of true freedom and happiness.
Most psychologists have postulated a latency period from around seven to puberty when, they say,, the gang, male or female is really unconsciously homosexual, and shows no interest in the opposite sex. Our only means of study the conditioned child does not give us evidence enough either way. I find that our gang age boys have longish periods when they have no interest in the girls. In their phantasy play among trees, holes, branch huts, girls have no part. After a few weeks there will be a wave of lovemaking which in a natural way would mean gentle genital play, but too often it takes the form of sadistic horseplay . . . another proof that antilife conditioning mars the will to love and be loved.
There is much more mutual interest between the sexes just before and during puberty, but here again one finds too many who cannot love. If we have six boys of fifteen or sixteen in the top form, the chances are that only two will have love affairs. Boys who do not learn to dance and who simply look on, it suddenly strikes me, seldom seem to have girls friends, but that may not be true in all cases of nondancing boys. Genuine love affairs occur, sometimes lasting for three years, these often between girls and boys who have been in the school since around the age of five. Latecorners are inclined to be ffirtatious, promiscuous, but no rule can be made out of the fact.
Every older pupil knows from my conversation and my books that I approve of a full sex life for all who wish for one, whatever the age. When I lecture I am often asked if I provide contraceptives and if not, why not? This is an old and a vexed question that touches deep emotions in all of us. That I do not provide contraceptives is a matter of bad conscience in me, for to compromise in any way is to me difficult and alarming. On the other hand to provide contraceptives to children, over and under the age of consent, would be a sure way of closing down my school. One cannot advance in practice much ahead of the crowd.
I know of no argument against youth’s love life that holds water. Nearly every one is based on repressed emotion or hate of lifethe religious, the moral, the expedient, the arbitrary, the pornographic. None answer the question why nature or God gave a strong sex instinct and then forbade youth to u~e it unless sanctioned by the elders of society. Those elders, some of them, have shares in companies that run films full of sex appeal and suggestion, or in businesses that sell all sorts of makeup attractions to make girls more delectable to boys, or in magazines that make sadistic pictures and stories a magnet to youth; some sit on benches and judge the sexstarved youths who steal or rape or murder. If one elder statesman had the courage to do what Homer Lane did in his Little Commonwealth, collect delinquents of both sexes and give them self-determination and happiness, he would be doing more for wayward youth than all the other institutions in the land. And if he went a step ahead of Lane and allowed his delinquents to have a love life, I make the guess that no youth in that colony would ever be sentenced for rape or murder. Love is a healing thing, a tender, giving thing. Granted that it can be a hideous, ugly thing as wifebeating and childbeating show, but that is the other side of the love coin, love changed into sadism by hate of life.
I should be dealing with facts and not with views and beliefs. I sum
up the facts about love and sex in Summerhill thus They are a compromise
formation, proving only that, when sex morality does not inhibit, some
of the perverted factors in sex tend to lessen or disappear :the Voyeur
element, the purely pornographic (but we have phases of obscene remarks
on W.C. walls), the guilty leering element (our pupils do not snigger when
a film shows a chamber pot).
Negative aspects show a tendency of some who come late to school (thirteen
and over) to be promiscuous in desire if not always in practice, and here
I mean by promiscuity changing partners too often. But pupils who came
at five have been known to be promiscuous. The roots are far back in a
child’s life, and the chief thing we know about them is that they are
unhealthy roots leading to variety but seldom to fulfilment and happiness.
After they leave Summerhill they marry, sometimes old schoolmates, more
often outsiders.
Old pupils do not show any wish to redeem the world; I cannot think of one who has any desire to pioneer in education or medicine or anything else. The big majority of present and past pupils have no interest in politics. There is a minority of keen Communists, but with only two exceptions known to me, all are from C.P. homes. I have tried to be as honest as I can about the semifree child in Summerhill. He and she has merits that disciplined children do not acquire; I cannot see the work in perspective, and can only quote what visitors have said. “These children have a poise, a selfconfidence without aggression that one cannot see in most children,” said an Indian lady ... “They never act; they talk to you as man to man without fear and deference and without forwardness,” have said many visitors from many lands. “They are interested in and grasp things like foreign events in a way I have never found in American children,” said an American teacher. And to give the other side, a local woman wrote to my publisher protesting against his issuing my books... “The man and his evil school have corrupted all the youth in the small town the school lives in.” In case this statement may cause alarm I must tell of a village teacher about ten miles away who mentioned my school in a local teachers’ conference. “Not a damn one had ever heard of it,” he reported to me with a big fat chuckle.
