The Free Child
AS Neill
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PROGRESSIVE SCHOOLS
A letter from a mother has made me go back to first things. She writes:
“I would send my daughter to your school if I could find out what it is
all about. I have read your books, and, if you don't mind my saying so,
you don't get your message over the footlights. What is Summerhill? How
does it really differ from other progressive schools?” I thought of the
old woman who listened intelligently to the chief engineer's description
of the ship's engine. At the end she said: “I understand perfectly, but
what is the use of the boiler?”
It is an alarming thought that I have been writing for years without
making my beliefs and actions clear. Yet I sympathise with the good lady;
she is right in one way; it it almost impossible to make emotional things
clear, fundamental things, things deeper than thought. Concretely any teacher
can describe Bobby as a mathematician, but to describe Bobby as a human
personality is extremely difficult. However I must try again, with an illustration.
Beatrice came six months ago at the age of eleven, came from one of the
best girls’ schools. She was demure, softvoiced, mannerly, social, a sweet
child. Today she is a little hooligan, swearing, throwing water on people,
breaking things. The other children are not hooligans; they are not antisocial;
their manners are good and natural, so that we must rule out any suggestion
that Beatrice is copying others. Practically every girl in every nice girls’
school in the country would react in the same way. Why? The simple answer
is that Bea was never allowed to be herself. She was conditioned, taught,
influenced by adults.
Now arises the question: What happens to the thousands of girls who continue all their school life in conditioning schools? Bea is living out at eleven. When do they live out? Or do they ever live out? I cannot answer the question because I have never had to study such girls; I can only make guesses. I guess that one difference is that these girls accept life more readily, and by life here I mean conventional life, conventional behaviour, conventional ideas. At sixteen Bea, if with a Summerhill boy, will say: “Half a mo, I must go to the bogs,” and both will have no more reaction than if she said: “I am going to lunch.” I doubt if a girl from a pukka girls’ school would be so easy and frank at sixteen or even at twenty six. The illustration may seem weak, but the frankness, the lack of unnecessary false modesty is not weak. One could take other illustrations of the difference. A girl who has lived out is likely to be the more sincere woman, a woman who goes to fundamental things, who follows convention with her tongue in her cheek, striving not to look or act differently from other people, but aware of the final valuelessness of outward things and appearances; she will seek manners rather than etiquette; as a mother she will think in terms of happiness and sincerity rather than accept the neighbours’ trumpery values of clean hands and faces. I hope I shall give no offence when I say that the mothers who have complained to me about the untidiness of my school and the children have mostly come from nice girls’ schools. That is the teal reason why Summerhill has seldom had pupils from the upper middle class. Such mothers look for outer things; they see muddy children, noisy, rowdy, making their bedrooms into rag stores with paper and bits of cloth all over the floor. “Why must you allow children to be so untidy?” they say again and again. The conditioned mother must look for all that does not matter, because what does matter in herself has been bottled up. It is useless to tell such a woman that all these things do not matter, that when a child has freedom and balanced food and fresh air, nothing else is of any importance. They try, poor souls, to believe me but they cannot. So my answer to the question of what happens to the bottled up emotions of our girl? school girls is this . . . it finds an outlet in destroying the best in their children, it goes to further all the hypocrisy, the smugness, the fear of public opinion that perpetuates a society in which most people are blind to fundamental issues.
And in the sexual sphere what happens with the nicely brought up girls? Their segregated school life, when it does not lead to homosexuality, active or passive, must keep them ignorant of all the necessary knowledge of child sexuality that is known to us. As mothers many of them will show disapproval of any sign of sexuality in their babies; they will take their hands from their sex parts with a disapproving look; they will evade or lie when a child asks them the truth about birth. How can it be otherwise when their school and home life avoided the rawness of life?
Then the question of how Summerhill differs from other progressive schools. Summerhill has been a scientific experiment in this respect, that we strove to impose nothing, that we simply stood by and observed what children were and did when left to themselves. Here we differed from many a progressive school, the kind of school that is founded to carry out some ideal of an adult or a body of adults. The idea may be religious or uplifting, as in the schools that endeavour to mould a child's taste by playing Bach and showing Rembrandt pictures on the wall; the ideal may be a moral one. When I asked a few adolescents from a famous coed school if they had any love affairs in the school, the answer was no, but on my expressing surprise, the answer became: “We sometimes have a friendship between a boy and a girl, but it is never a love affair.” Since I saw some handsome lads and some bonny lassies around I had to conclude that the school was imposing an antilove ideal on the pupils. I once said to the headmaster of a progressive school: “Have you any love affairs in the school?” “No;’ he said gravely, “but then we never take problem children.”
Here I feel uneasy, I feel slightly disloyal to my fellow teachers. After all there is honour among thieves. I know some of them well, like them, feel their sincerity and appreciate their worth. I know that we can still differ and continue to be friends. When one says that his pupils love Beethoven and won't have jazz, I am convinced that he has used his influence, because my pupils by a large majority favour hot jazz. I think he is wrong, but I also think he is a good fellow and an honest one. I hasten to say that the hot jazz epidemic has nothing to do with me, for I hate the noisy, quacking stuff. He and his fellows influence children because they think they know what children ought to have; some of them think they know what children ought to be.
Another way in which Summerhill differs from many progressive schools lies in the fact that they have much larger numbers. We can have our fifty or more pupils in one lounge at a General Meeting, so that government is direct; a show of hands decides a motion. When a school has three hundred this mode cannot be used. Selfgovernment then means delegated authority, a council or twelve or so. I hear of such councils where the headmaster is always present and can use his veto. I have never used a veto, never had a veto, never have seen any occasion on which I wanted to have one. And I think that my small numbers have this advantage, that there is more contact between young and older pupils, a contact that tends to foster understanding and patience and charity. Personally I should never want more than sixty pupils in my school for this reason alone.
Possibly Summerhill has less anxiety about sex than most other schools. A moral atmosphere can, of course, inhibit sex, but some headmasters and mistresses worry a lot about what they consider dangers. In most schools there is a definite plan to separate boys from girls, especially in their sleeping quarters. Love affairs are not encouraged; they are not encouraged in Summerhill, they are only left alone because an adolescent love affair is so tender and lovely and natural. Now I am not going to be so daft as to argue that an old Summerhillian is a better individual than an expupil of St. X or St. Y school. One cannot think in terms of individuals. Nor am I thinking in terms of numbers; I am thinking of ultimates. The average progressive school has what is called ordered freedom; freedom within definite limits. A continuance of this type of school will result in ordered lives, in halffree citizens, in a compromise, while a continuance of education with real freedom must result finally in free men and women, not in a generation, not in two generations, but in the end people will be free. Free to be what? Themselves, themselves without bunk and secondary traits, without hate and fear and authoritarianism. Collective farming and fiveyear plans will not bring real freedom, nor will sermons and lectures, punishment and reward. And I am not saying this with my head in the clouds; I am saying it after experience of the incredible results that freedom has on unhappy and warped children.And if the good lady who wrote me still thinks that I have not made clear what my school stands for, I must be a damned bad writer.
