The Free Child - AS Neill - CAN THE HARD WAY CURE?

The papers tell us of a new method of dealing with delinquents. It is a hard method, the civil equivalent of the army Glasshouse, long fatigues, strenuous drills, little leisure, strict punishment for defaulters but not corporal punishment. One picture shows boys drilling with huge logs on their shoulders. There seem to be no privileges. At the end of their time the boys say they hated every minute of it, and swear they will keep straight rather than go through the same again.
In these days of savage assaults with coshes and knuckle dusters the authorities are at their wits’ end, and apparently will try anything to stop the crime wave among delinquents. I grant that three months of what a magistrate called hell may deter potential delinquents, but conduct founded on fear of consequences is not one to admire. Such treatment never gets down to root causes, to fundamentals. To an adolescent the treatment spells hate, the harshness will make permanent haters of society.
Over thirty years ago Homer Lane proved by his work in The Little Commonwealth that youthful criminals can be cured by love, not sentimental love; Lane called it approval, being on the side of the child. He got tough boys and girls from the London courts, antisocial, hardboiled, glorying in their reputation and prowess as crooks and thieves. They came to the Commonwealth and found a community with selfgovernment and approval, and gradually they became decent honest citizens. I used to count some of them as my friends. So I call Lane's way the love way, and the new hell way the hate way, and as hate never cured anyone of anything, I conclude that the hell way will never help youth to be good and social. Yet I know very well that if I were a magistrate today and had a cosh merchant to deal with, I should be gravelled to know what to do with him.

There is no Commonwealth to send him to, and I say so with shame, for Lane died in 1925 and our authorities have not learned anything from that remarkable man, so that, as a magistrate, I should have little choice of institutions. The Little Commonwealth was closed down after a neurotic girl made a complaint of sexual assault against Lane. A K.C. who had no sympathy for Lane's methods was sent to investigate, and found the charge was a false one. Why then did the Home Office make the further life of the Commonwealth dependent on Lane's ceasing to be superintendent? The natural guess is that the Home Office did not believe in curing by love, that it demanded that cure should follow punishment and repentance. Lane knew the inside workings of children, but the Home Office knew only the ignorant, smugness of adults. There have been a few Home Secretaries since Lane's time, and none of them have changed the official line, that punishment is necessary. Not that there have been no attempts to seek the other way . . . Borstals with open gates, an excellent and sincere desire to get to understand the delinquent and his home, hence that fine body of Probation Officers. The psychiatrists, in spite of much hostility from the legal profession, have gone a long way to teach the public that delinquency is not wickedness, but a form of sickness that needs sympathy and understanding. Children's clinics must have saved many a child from Borstal or prison. The tide is flowing towards love instead of hate, towards understanding instead of bigoted, moral indignation. It is a slow tide, so slow that Mr. Justice Canute can stem a bit of it by writing to the press about the arrogance of the alienists who have no right to have a say in purely legal matters like deciding when a man is insane or not. But even a slow tide carries a little of contamination away, and in time the tide must grow in volume.

I lived with young crooks, many of them thieves; I saw how unhappy and hateful they were, how inferior, how confused emotionally. They came and were arrogant, disrespectful to me, because II was a teacher, a father substitute, an enemy. I lived with their tense hate and suspicion, and in a few years these haters went out into the world as happy, social beings. I did not cure them; it was the environment that cured, for it gave out trust, security, complete lack of blame or judging. It was an exhausting life in some ways, a life of sacrifice much of the time; one needed to have infinite patience and belief in the essential goodness of humans. It was the only method that sought deep understanding. The hell way never tries to understand; it is the easy way, just as it is an easy way for a dull teacher to have perfect silence and obedience.
The other day a boy stole a bicycle and was sent to the new “cure.” We know nothing about him. Experience tells me he must have been unhappy, for no happy person steals. What was his background? Was his home happy? Did his parents tell him the truth always? Did he feel guilty about masturbation? Guilty about religion? Why was he disrespectful to his parents? Did he fancy they did not love him? There must have been some sort of a hell inside him, and most surely the hell he has been sent to will not counteract that inner hell. I make haste to express the opinion that a course of therapy would not necessarily solve the lad's problems. Sure it could help him a lot, could rid him of some of his fears and hates, could give him some selfrespect, but so long as the original hate elements remained in his environment, he would be liable to regression at any time. The therapy of his parents would lead to more success in the end.
Now someone may throw at me all sorts of statistics showing that so many per cent of Borstal boys make good, so many girls from Approved Schools, etc. I refuse to read them. That a boy from a strict Approved School may become a respectable bricklayer and a stout supporter of his local nonconformist church proves nothing, any more than does the case of the Salvationist who saw the light after a lifetime of drunkenness. Not statistics, just truth, and there is only one truth about children, that if they are loved and free they become good and honest.

This sounds a simple dictum, yet I am aware of the many snags that crop up in practice. Supposing that this bicycle thief has been spoiled by his parents, given licence and not freedom, then he will not understand treatment by love and freedom; he will assume that the teacher or psychologist who treats him is a sissy, and he will react in the wrong way. It is then necessary to prick his inflated bubble, but the pricking need not be hell for three months. That will not destroy the bubble; it will only deflate the balloon (to mix the metaphor) and it can be reinflated when he leaves the hated institution.
Still the question is open ... What does one do with a boy who pinches a bike? The most fundamental way would be to give him a reward of a pound, taking the correct standpoint that the boy is stealing love symbolically, and the reward is to him a symbol of love, but here again one must qualify, for if the boy is of low mentality, or, worse still, arrested emotionally, the reward trick will not sink in. Or if he has a swelled head (Grassenwahn) he will not benefit from the symbolic gift. In my own work with problems, now years past, for I live with normal children in my old age, nearly every thief reacted to my rewards for stealing; the only real failures were the very few who were what one might call conscious crooks, unreachable by therapy or by the disguised therapy of rewarding. In this context I mention the case of a boy who was always riding other children's cycles. Tried by a jury of children around his own age he was charged with:
“Constantly breaking the private property rule by using other kids’ bikes.” Verdict: Guilty. Punishment: “The community is asked to subscribe to buy him a bicycle.” The community subscribed.
Has violence ever produced good? Who can answer? What good resulted from the two world wars? From the Peninsular Campaign? From the Gestapo or the Ogpu? The Southern slaves were freed after a violent war. Christianity became a great power after the Crucifixion.

I fancy one could prove anything, prove the pros and cons by giving instances. When we leave battles and movements and think of the individual human being, it may be we are on safer ground. I know of 110% proof that a person has been made good by violence, by cruelty, by hate. On the contrary I know of many instances where a child or adolescent has become good after being treated with love, and by love I mean approval, sympathy, lack of censure or even criticism. I simply do not know how an adult criminal would react to love. I am pretty certain that rewarding a Dartmoor lag for stealing would not cure him, just as I am pretty certain that a spell in prison does not cure him. Treatment is most hopeful only for the young, so far as the criminal is concerned. We must always remember that curing depends on the patient more than it does on the therapist, and that is why there are so many failures among people who go to therapy because they have been bullied into going by relations. If, for instance, a man succeeds in sending a reluctant wife to be analysed, she quite naturally goes with a grudge . . . “My husband doesn't think me good enough; he wants me to be changed, and I don't like it.” And the same difficulty applies to the adult criminal when under duress he is compelled to undergo therapy. Therapy for adolescents and adults must be wished for by the patients.
This therapy question is far from being easy. My own opinion, after thirty one years of Summerhill, is that freedom alone will cure most delinquencies in a child. Freedom of course, not licence, not sentimentality, not idealism. Freedom alone will not cure pathological cases; it will barely touch cases of arrested development. Here I am thinking of children in a home or boarding school where freedom can be practised all the time. The boys who steal cycles and live at home are the real problem. How much such children are benefited by daily or weekly visits to a Children's Clinic, I do not know, never having been in direct contact with such Clinics. I only know that their methods are not harsh and hellish, that the workers there do try hard to understand and treat without moral judgements or character moulding.

Their handicap is the homes of the sick children, and I conjecture that their best successes result when they manage to persuade the parents to change their treatment of the children.
Why the necessity of a Home that will give a boy hell? Most people still believe in free will; they are sure that a bad boy wants to be bad, but with the help of God or a big stick he has the power of choosing the good. And if he refuses to exercise this power, then, begad, we'll damn well see that he suffers for his contumaciousness (called by my Caithness granny countermashishness). People are not consciously cruel in this attitude; many a devout Christian really believes that the wicked must be punished in order to be saved. I never heard of the Predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa lifting a finger or a voice to protest against the inhuman treatment of natives, maybe because they consider the native to be the descendant of Ham, a hewer of wood and drawer of water. We accept the idea of violence without question or analysis. I haven't hit a child for nearly forty years, yet as a young teacher I used the strap vigorously without ever stopping to think about it. I suppose that my inner man has not changed much if at all; I don't beat now because I have become aware of the dangers and the hate behind beating. I am not claiming that my hate is not still here. If I saw a brutal man attacking my little daughter I would hate and act like a hater, yet if a sadistic child attacked her I would naturally protect her, but would not feel the hate that an adult attacker would arouse. We should protect ourselves against any notions that we are Christs, turners of the other cheek, loving our enemies. Even Jesus could not love the money changers. To advocate the necessity of approval in education does not mean that the preacher is perfect, exalted, beyond good and evil. Only a half wit will thank God that he is not like other men. If you are not like other men you can never be of any use to them, so that the first necessity for any reformer or pioneer is to have his feet on the ground and his head very far from the clouds.

All the same the reformer is tempted to imagine that he is not like other men. My Theosophist friends used to tell me, in the nineteen twenties, that I was a very poorly developed soul compared with fine folks like Annie Besant and Krishnamurti, and those who believed in metempsychosis assured me that, after a few passings over, my soul would gradually become something finer and nobler
cheerful news. In the nineteen fifties I have to resist the temptation to think that I have a soul better developed than the magistrates who want to give a boy hell, that is I bring the subjective into something that ought to be absolutely objective. Our little egos will obtrude all the time; the Little Man whom Reich wrote about so trenchantly keeps warping our judgements, exaggerating our selfimportance. That is no doubt why one is so disappointed when one meets an adored hero, a writer, artist, musician. One sees only the Little Man, perhaps vain, selfcentred like so many stage folks, arrogant . . . when I met H. G. Wells I thought him irritable, accustomed to have deference paid to him. I may have got a wrong impression, but my impression of his earlier works (Kip ps, Poll)’, etc.) remained and remains constant through the years, an impression of greatness. I would rather judge a man by his work than by his presence in a club or a drawing room:
indeed I would go almost so far as to put a ban on the biography of any great man . .. if we want to keep our illusions. The Lives of men like Carlyle and Ruskin tell only of the Little Men that they were at home; they hardly touch the Big Men that gave us their works. A cynic might say, in this context, that Shakespeare is adored because we don't know much about his life.
All this means that we should keep our own little egos out of big issues, in this case, the education of children. Homer Lane is dead, unknown in his native New England, known in Britain only to a few teachers and parents. I never see his name mentioned in a ncw book on child psychology.

But his work inspired my Summerhill and the good work of men like 0. L. Shaw and David Wills and John Aitken. George Douglas Brown wrote one book of genius; The House with the Green Shutters. James Veitch’s Life (Herbert Jenkins, Ltd.), just out as I write, does not show him to be, at least in my estimation, a very interesting personality; likeable, clever, yes, but not the kind of standingout character one expects a genius to be. And it does not matter; what matters is that a great novel came from his pen, a novel that will live as one of Scotland's finest pieces of literature. It possibly made Barrie and Ian McLaren and Crockett unreadable for all time.
No, our private lives mean something only to a very few friends and relations, mean something ultimately to ourselves alone. I refuse to believe that the other way, the totalitarian way of subordinating the private life completely to the public interest, is a good way. We must remain individuals, even in our altruism. We have to keep, however, our private selves out of our work when we are dealing with boys who steal bicycles. Marxism and Fascism say that you have to keep your private self out of your work when you are working for the community, but these two ideas are not similar. In dealing with the young thief the parent or teacher or magistrate has to face emotional factors in himself. Is he a moralist, a hater, a sadist, a disciplinarian? Is he a suppresser of sex in the young? Has he any glimmering of depth psychology or biology? Does he act conventionally and through prejudice? In short, how free is he himself? None of us are entirely free emotionally because we were conditioned in our cradles, and perhaps the right question to ask is: Are we free enough to keep from butting in on the life of another, however young that other may be, free enough to be objective? I cannot sec how one can ask and answer these questions if one has to follow a party line.

I can imagine that if a problem boy had a strong father complex that was attached to Sir Winston Churchill, I should with complete impunity get a photograph of the Premier and encourage the boy to shy rotten eggs at it in order to live out his hate practically, but I fancy it would take some nerve for a teacher in another country to encourage the boy to make a target of a picture of a man who syinbolised his national ideal. This is only an attempt to demand that no man should be bound by any system, political, religious, national, moral. I grant that this view is limited, narrow if you like. Our bicycle thieves are like the acne of youth, outward signs of a sick body, the sick body of our humanity. No amount of personal therapy will touch the evil of a bad home, a slum street, a poverty stricken family. And I often wonder how much our schooling has to do with delinquency. From the age of five to fifteen most children sit on school benches getting a purely head education. There is hardly any outlook for their emotional life, and it is the emotional disturbance that makes a boy steal a bicycle, and all his knowledge of school subjects has no part in the act. I wonder if petty delinquency would be so rife if children spent most of their school life in doing things. Not that creation and construction are enough in themselves, for, if the atmosphere is moral and authoritarian, I question if practical work has much value. I think of my father's village school in Angus. Most of the pupils were children of farm workers, poor, ill fed many of them, often ragged, tough, mischievous. After a smattering of the Three Rs they left school at fourteen and began to work on the land. I never knew of any who became delinquents... the village bad boy for whom my father prophesied the gallows became a very respectable station master. It is a truism that juvenile crime is worst in the big cities, and not only juvenile crime. I could leave my car out in a Suffolk village for a week and not a thing would be stolen, but I should hesitate to leave an unlocked car for an hour in London. It is not a question of numbers, of saying that there may be the same percentage of crooks in a village as there is in a city, although we know that crime is usually gang work, and gangs in the country cannot assemble easily. There is more in it than that.

There is the difference between a sharp London Street arab and the bucolic calm of a farm hand. The logical idea would be to abolish cities and have us all go back to the land, but no wise man would preach such a gospel.
I am no sentimentalist about the country. I cannot rhapsodise about the beauty of mountains and sunsets. When evacuated to North Wales during the war I never noticed the glory of the mountain colours after the first week. Yet there must be a subtle, unconscious influence affecting dwellers on the land. It is generally assumed that living in the country makes for dullness of intellect, bluntness of emotion; we are apt to picture the rustic as primitive in humour, uncultured, primitive in every way. To do so is to make the mistake we make about animals. We say that a dog is not very intelligent. I once asked a Welsh shepherd who had just won first prize in a sheepdog trial how much his dog understood what it was doing. “It does not understand a thing, not a bloody thing,” he said. “It just answers my whistle. There never was a dog that you could tell to put three sheep in one pen and six in the other.” That might be true, for we are using the wrong standard. If famine and destruction came to England my dog would be likely to survive longer than I did; it would have the right feeling about how to get its food and I would not. So with our rustics; they know and feel many things that our townsmen know and feel not. Their wisdom is different from ours, and their innate honesty and sociability would appear to be better than that of city dwellers They are nearer to things that matter. Possibly the smell of cow dung is better for the soul than the petrol fumes of Piccadilly; certainly, in an environment where animal sex is an everyday affair, there should be a less neurotic attitude to sex than that obtaining in cities. I think I am not reviving the Noble Savage myth in a new form the Perfect Rustic. But, even if half of what I say about the country dweller is true, the question of living on the land does not touch the problem of the city delinquent. The city is there and will remain as long as humanity lives.

I say that, although we cannot change society at once, cannot abolish all slums and reform brutal parents, we could do much more for the young delinquent by forgetting about punishment and concentrating on charity and love. Let me suffer for a few minutes from the delusion that I am Home Secretary with infinite powers. Let me state a programme, a five years’ plan.
Firstly I should abolish all Borstals and Approved Schools and substitute coeducational colonies on the land. True I have said a few pages back that there are few if any Homer Lanes to run such places, but as Home Secretary I should at once set up special training centres for teachers and wardens and housemothers. I can think of at least halfadozen men and women who could take over the headships of these colleges. Each colony would he completely selfgoverning. The staff would have no special privileges; they would have the same food and heating. Pupils would be paid for any community work they did, as they were in The Little Commonwealth. The Stimmung of the colony would be freedom. No religion, no moralizing, no authority would be tolerated. Teachers would be taught to be equals with the pupils; they would have no protective dignity, no sarcasm; they would inspire no fear. But they would have to be men and women of infinite patience and able to see far ahead, willing to have trust in ultimate results.
As Home Secretary of moral England I could not decree that coeducation should lead naturally to a love life for youth. I know that Lane had worries about this aspect, and at one time was quite alarmed when some of his pupils began to pair off. I know that Lane did not believe in a love life for adolescents. But I should leave judgement to the people who ran the colonies. And even if one could not allow a full love life, the mixing together of the sexes would lead to much that was valuable, to tenderness, natural good manners, to a necessary knowledge of the opposite sex, to the lessening of pornography and leering sniggers.

The chief characteristic of the staff would be the ability to show trust, to treat the pupils as people and not as thieves and destroyers. But they would have to be realistic and not attempt too much at a time, as, for instance, making a bad thief treasurer of the college bean feast fund. The staff would have to curb any temptation to jaw, especially to pijaw, realising that action counts for much more than talk. They would require to know the history of each delinquent, the whole background. Intelligence tests would have a minor place in the college. They do not denote the things that are vital; they do not touch emotion nor creation nor originality nor imagination.
The atmosphere would be that of a hospital rather than that of an institution. Just as no medical man will take a moral attitude to a patient with syphilis so our staff would take no moral attitude to the sickness we call delinquency. Where it would differ from a hospital would be that it gave no psychological medicines or drugs; the cure would come only from the love in the environment and from faith in human nature. True there would be failures, incurables, that society would still have to reckon with. I know they would form a tiny minority, for I know that the majority would react to love and tolerance and trust. I recall Lane's story of a very bad boy he interviewed at a London juvenile court. Lane handed him a pound note for his fare down to Dorset, knowing that the boy would bring him the exact change. I recall the American prison governor who sent a lifer, an expert in the shoe department, to New York to buy new machinery. He returned with a full account of the new machines. The governor said: “Oh, why didn't you take the chance to slip yourself in New York ?“ The convict scratched his head. “I dunno, guv'nor, I guess it was because you trusted me.” It is this wonderful trust in people that prisons and punishment and birches and cats can never touch, this trust that signifies that someone is giving you love and not hate. The great tragedy of humanity is that it loves and cannot express its love.

I am making no attempt to describe the inner workings of my official Home Office colonies. Given the belief, the love, all will follow almost automatically. I excluded religion because it talks, it preaches, it tries to sublimate, to raise to a higher power; it suppresses, inhibits; it postulates sin where sin does not exist; it believes in free will when there is no free will, for no man can be good or bad by taking thought. The word thought frightens me, and the phrase Higher Thought makes me think of all the futile middle class reformers and fanatics I have met. In a recent lecture Krishnamurti began by saying: “Nothing has ever been solved by thought.” Right, hence in my imaginary colonies thought would occupy a relatively small sphere; in important matters thought should come after emotion. There is danger in this too. You give your emotion to a Hitler and then approve of what he does; to a Party and then approve of the Prague executions while signing a petition to have the Rosenbergs in America reprieved. Humanitarianism is indivisible. Your emotions are aroused when a woman is coshed on the head and then you think:
Give him the cat. Thought can follow any kind of emotion, and what I am advocating is that our emotions should be conditioned by charity and love, that we shall not give thought to what is cruel and unjust. And there is only one way to reach this ideal; to leave people alone, to stop trying to paint the lily even if to us it looks like a stinging nettle. That ideal can be achieved only if youth is free from imposed authority and hate and punishment. I know from experience that this is the only way, so that I should not be accused of being a voice crying in the wilderness, crying a panacea that is only theory and wish fulfilment.

Progressive Schools