The Free Child
AS Neill
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I am no prophet but I think that the pioneer school is doomed. Under
Communism it could not exist, and under the mild Socialism of Britain its
life is likely to be short, not that the State will deliberately kill the
pioneer school directly and openly, but its heavy taxation will soon prevent
any parents but the very rich from sending their children to boarding schools.
And the boarding schools of the rich are not likely to be pioneering schools.
My argument may be met by indignant denials from State teachers. They may
give instances where State schools have been allowed to carry out experiments
. . . E. F. O’Neill in Lancashire, A. A. Bloom in Stepney, but these two
excellent men can only experiment within the State system. O’Neill could
saw up his ugly desks and make serviceable benches and tables; he could
teach in a new and practical way. What he could not do (I assume) was to
make all lessons voluntary; to abolish religious teaching. Recently I visited
Bloom’s school and was delighted with the Stimmung and the obvious love
and approval of children. I saw no sign of fear in that school, and I could
not see how Bloom could go further than he has gone under State control.
True, the State will allow a teacher to pioneer in—say—methods of teaching
History, but not in methods of living. Some time ago the headmaster of
a Secondary School told his pupils they could make their own timetables,
and the press gave the idea publicity. His Education Authority met and
decided that such an innovation should not be approved. If so mild an experiment
in freedom is officially condemned, what hope is there for pioneering in
State schools? I cannot see any future for pioneering if it is to be bound
and shackled and conditional.
Summerhill is having a struggle to keep going.
Other pioneer schools are having a similar struggle to survive I think then that the prospective demise of the pioneer school makes the subject of selfregulation a very vital one. Someone may laugh and say: “Since so few parents have their offspring at pioneer schools, what earthly chance is there that the closing of these schools will be a loss that must be compensated for by selfregulation ?“ Quite a fair statement too. My answer is that the freedom of the pioneer school has, to some extent, permeated other schools, State and Private, but I rather doubt if any Public School has been affected in any way. Many and many a teacher has said to me: “We can’t do what Summerhill does, but the mere fact that it lives and works is an inspiration to us who are under a rigid system.” When the pioneer school dies, where will the stimulus come from? I say: from the parent who believes in selfregulation. Here I am not trying to stand on a pinnacle and shout that all State schools are bad and dangerous. There are some fine schools, especially Infant Schools, using love and not fear, but since the bad ones can and do exist I am deliberately taking a pessimistic view. I can visualise a time when so many parents will be using selfregulation that they will not tolerate a school system that will undo their work with their children at home. I sometimes wonder how I should feel if I had to send my Zoë to a State school. In a bad one she would have to inhibit her naturalness about sex; she would be taught about the God whom H. G. Wells called “the great absentee”; she would have to answer the teacher’s questions instead of asking them as she does now; some antilife spinster might slap her face for speaking out of turn. I hasten to add that I am not thinking of any school in East Suffolk where we live. If I had a son instead of a daughter he might be caned for saying bloody. The conflict in the child would be disastrous . . . who is right, teacher or Daddy and Mummy?
Here I am inclined to laugh at myself. I am tired of the nostra that promise to save humanity . . . food reformers, political agitators, drug combines, schools of psychology, religious panaceas. I laugh because I am adding another panacea to the regiment of soapbox orators and their wares, adding selfregulation. Yet I claim that of all the nostra selfregulation is about the only one that has not been tried. All the others deal with adulthood. To begin with infants may seem ludicrous to many, and yet it is not too fanciful to say that Christianity began to fail because its advocates dropped the Suffer Little Children component and adopted the adult, hateful gospel according to St. Paul. Communism seems also to have dropped its little children component in favour of a patriarchal authority. Hence from my little soapbox in the park I implore the passing and unheeding pedestrians to seek in our treatment of children the solution of human frustration and misery. Anthropological theories have not touched what is deep in ourselves; the psychoanalytical theories of incest and anal eroticism resemble the medical treatment of symptoms in disease. I grant tat we are all ignorant of important factors. Whence antiSemitism? Lynching? Why did humanity come to adopt an authoritarian hateful system of suppression and moral training? I do not know the answers. Luckily it is not necessary to trace the origin of something in order to change or abolish it. Whatever the origins of antiSemitism or of race hatred, the truth is that when children are free they show no sign of either, to me a clear proof that there is no instinctive or natural thing as race hatred or hatred of Jews. So wit religion. Free children, by showing tat they have no use for a higher power or an object of worship (and fear), prove the fallacy of those who claim that humanity must by its deep nature seek a God.
Selfregulation is the answer, Reich’s answer, to the arresting questions arising out of Freud’s discovenes. Every Freudian analyst must feel, even if dimly, that the hours spent in analysing a patient would never have been spent in a consulting room if the patient had been selfregulated as a baby. I say dimly because we cannot be sure of anything really. My daughter may have to go to an analyst one day saying: “Doctor, I need treatment. I am suffering from a father compl~... no, I don’t mean what you mean with that smirk on your face; I mean that I am fed up at being introduced as the daughter of A. S. Neill. More than that people expect far too much of me; they seem to think I should be perfect. The old man is dead now but I can’t forgive him for parading me in his books. And now, do I lie down on this sofa?” One never knows.
To go back to progressive schools, especially boarding schools, I know that the mass of citizens would not miss them if they all perished. They have been class affairs for the rich and comparatively welloff parents. In the end the day school will be the only one to survive, and I think that a great pity. I believe in boarding schools but only those that have freedom. Since children are not young adults it seems to be desirable that they should live their lives in their own community, measuring themselves against their own peers, especially in these modern days of small families. One cannot compare a day school with a boarding one. Suppose a day school decides to have selfgovernment. What can meetings discuss? What laws can be passed? In a State system of compulsory lessons there is hardly anything to legislate about. The timetable is there, the subjects, the exams. The important part of the day pupil’s life is lived outwith the school walls. In a boarding school thirtysix weeks of the year are spent entirely in school. In Summerhill General Meeting the topics dealt with are nearly all tol)ics that would not appear in a day school—children breaking their bedtime rules, noises at meal times, the social programme—how to proportion the time given to seniors and juniors, should the Saturday night dance end at ten or eleven? All are concerned with social activities, with relationships between pupil and pupil, staff and pupil, staff and staff. Last Saturday I spoke strongly about the breaking of the bedtime rules and the noise and the sleepy heads the next morning, and I proposed that culprits should be fined all their pocket money for each offence. A boy of fourteen proposed that there should be a penny reward per hour for everyone staying up after his or her bedtime. I got a few votes but he got a big majority. The reward will not come from me but from the community cash box and its collection of petty fines. How it will work out I do not know. Whether it works or not is a subsidiary matter; the valuable part is that children are trying different ways and means to keep the community together, to keep it social. But such a situation could hardly arise in a day school. The home would automatically settle the bedtime question, thus depriving childhood of the opportunity of thinking about it and acting about it. The boarding school can give the child the opportunity to live in a big family, a family without a father and mother, can give the chance to decide what is usually decided for him. The usual criticism is that a child should not be asked to face responsibilities that he is not ready for, that it is a crime to saddle a child with decisions he is not old enough to settle. That would be true if one acted only on theory, if one left commonsense out of the picture. We do not ask our five year olds whether they want fireguards or not; we do not ask them to decide whether they should go outside with a temperature or go to bed. If they have a temperature we do not seek their permission to feed them only on orange juice and water. We never tell bedwetters that they must wash out their sheets, and we have never told a child that he must finish his dinner, or that he must eat what we put before him.
When I come to think of it we treat children really as equals, in this way that by and large we treat them as if they were adults, knowing that they are different from adults and yet have some points in common. We do not demand that Uncle Bill must clear his plate when he dislikes carrots or that father must wash his hands before he sits down to a meal. By continually correcting children we must make them feel inferior; we injure their natural dignity. It is all a question of relativity. In heaven’s name what does it matter if Tommy sits down to a meal with unwashed hands? It matters in America where the nation is germ mad; it matters in suburbs where cleanliness is considered to be quite a long way ahead of godliness. Sometimes I have seen a parent write to a child in my school saying: “If you can’t spell better than you do I’d rather you did not write me.” I had that written to a girl of whom we were not quite sure if she were mentally defective or not. Even in Summerhill a child sometimes cannot get away from the home influence, the bad home influence that has no values, no knowledge of what a child thinks and feels. Alas, one cannot teach people values. More than once I have to cry to a complaining parent:
“Your boy is a thief, a bedwetter; he is antisocial, unhappy, inferior . . . and you come to me and grouse because he met you at the station with a dirty face and dirty hands!” I am a man slow to wrath, but when I meet a father or mother who will not or cannot acquire a sense of values about what is important and what is trifling in a child’s nature and behaviour, I do get angry, and perhaps that is why I am said to be antiparent. On the other hand what a joy it is when a mother comes down, meets her muddy, tattered child in the garden, beams and says to me: “Isn’t he looking well and happy?”
But I know how difficult it is. We all have our own standards of values and we measure others by our personal yardstick, just as we do when judging their sense of humour. I know two men whom I consider humourless. I have heard each remark about the other: “That guy has no sense of humour.” Worse still one of them said to me:
“You know, Neill, if you had a sense of humour you’d be a better fellow.” I could only apologise for my being a Scot. And so I possibly should apologise for being a man who is fanatic about children, and impatient of all parents and guardians who do not see children with my eyes.., said he hypocritically; the truth is that I know I am right about values so far as children are concerned, and the other fellow wrong.
Instruction to Expectant Fathers