The Free Child - AS Neill

I shall now look back on my educational career, and try to estimate the changes that growing old has brought. It is a far cry back to 1915 when I wrote A Dominie’s Log in Gretna Green. Then I had hardly heard of child psychology. It was Homer Lane who introduced me to it around 1918. I have often been asked: “How much have your ideas changed in the years? Have you found it necessary to modify your opinions?” Fundamentally, no; I have never doubted complete freedomnot licence, freedom. Summerhill, in its thirtyone years’ existence, has never changed so far as freedom has been concerned. The school today (1953) does not differ from the school it was in 1921. But in myself I have lived through phases, have lived out interests. One of them is therapy.
I remember vividly my youthful enthusiasm about psychological therapy. Freud opened a new world. Mankind was suffering because it was ignorant of the powerful workings of the Unconscious (we all spelt it with a capital U). Crime, hate, neurosis, perverted sex were all due to man’s unconscious wishes. Make the Unconscious conscious and we were in the Promised Land . . . no more unhappiness, beating of children, murder, scandal: we visioned a final Utopia in which all men were free and good. We young educators were apostles, not of Freud but of the new salvation. I think our first doubts and disillusionment arose when we began to meet the Freudians, who were for the most part physicians, spending their lives analysing neurotic patients. They were so painfully conscious of being therapists, so aloof, so fearful of getting into any emotional contact with folks who might potentially become their patients.

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I recall how delighted I was to become friends with David Eder and J. C. Flugel, Freudians who were human and chummy, who were never solemn, who could laugh and forget all about transferences and complexes and consulting rooms. They never showed the attitude so common to psychoanalysts, the superior attitude summed up in the answer to any argument . . . “You haven’t been analysed, and I can’t argue with you because you have blind spots that prevent your seeing the truth.” It was the final word; no further argument was of any use. It is significant that only one psychoanalyst ever sent me a pupil. A wellknown woman analyst, when told this, said:
“Naturally we don’t recommend Summerhill because Neill has used Freud’s ideas wrongly, without understanding them.”
I have sometimes wondered how true that was, and is. Freud showed that every neurosis is founded on sex repression. I said: I’ll have a school in which there will be no sex repression. Freud said that the Unconscious was infinitely more important and powerful than the Conscious. I said: In my school depth psychology will be the main thing. We won’t censure, punish, moralise; we’ll allow each and every child to live according to its deep impulses. I discovered slowly that the Freudians did not believe in freedom for children; they seemed to me to be confusing freedom with licence. In their consulting rooms in Harley Street they were treating children who had never had freedom to be themselves, and I am afraid they founded their theory of child psychology on these warped children. They found so much analeroticism among infants, but I have not found it among selfregulated babies. I have mentioned elsewhere in these pages how the aggression the Freudians find in children does not seem to be apparent in selfregulated children. I anticipate the answer: You did not find analeroticism because you had a blind spot for it: you don’t see aggression because of your own repressed aggression. The only answer to that is the vulgar one: So what?

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After all I went through therapy with Wilhelm Reich whose methods bring out emotions and reactions that rio talktalk analysis can approach, and might easily say: “You haven’t had a Reich therapy, and therefore you cannot possibly understand,” that is if I wanted to be stupidly and arrogantly argumentative. Educators treated children with love and understanding before Freud and Reich were born.

Well then, I gradually saw that the healing doctors had little to give me. My territory was prophylaxis, not curing, but it took me years to discover the full significance of this, took me years to learn that it was freedom that was curing Summerhill problem children, not my Private Lessons (analysis). I am ready to admit that those private lessons did not go down to great depths in the matter of anal characteristics and sucking phantasies, yet I very much doubt that, had I had Melanie Klein on the school staff, the final results would have been any better. I have never quite grasped the importance of telling a child of five that it is making father and mother have sexual intercourse when it makes two toy engines collide on the clinic floor, largely because I have never seen a child of five who cared a damn what anyone said to him when he was absorbed in his playing with toys. . . I am glad to say.

I cannot understand why the Freudians have not made their private practices subsidiary to fashioning an educational and familial system that will stop making children neurotic. I make the guess that they have always been so strictly scientific about children, fearful of giving babies complexes, so much so that some of them told parents not to kiss and hug their babies in case they should get fixations. “Do not have the baby with you in bed.” Now I don’t care what complexes I have or whether I am now writing through them, but I assert that no baby is ever harmed by a warm show of love from its parents, that is if the parents are socalled normal people. It is certainly true that a mother, sex starved or miserable because of her husband’s sex adventures, can do damage to her child by giving it the sex love that should go to a spouse, just as a father with no love in his own life can make his daughter neurotic by demanding unhealthy love from her.

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The psychoanalysts by their dicta cannot reach these parents, who are too unhappy to learn anything objectively, but I have known healthy parents who were so afraid of making mistakes that they refused to give their children the physical warmth that they needed. I have given out warmth to children for many years, hugged them playfully, tickled them in the ribs, swung them overhead, and I have never seen one symptom of a transference or a complex, (Edipus or Electra. Yesterday was my birthday. My Zoe, who will be six next month, said: “Daddy, you are old, aren’t you? You’ll die before me, won’t you? I’ll cry when you die.” “Hi, wait,” I said, “I will, maybe, live to see you married.”
In that case,” she said, “I won’t need to cry, will I?” It strikes me that if a small child can take it for granted that she won’t need her father when she grows up, she has automatically solved the dear old Edipus Complex. It is probable that two generations of selfregulated children would consign Edipus to the reference library.
However, by giving up therapy, I am not saying that I have given up child psychology. A girl of seventeen with anxious parents, controlled and shepherded all her life. hence a problem child, came to me the other day saying:
I want to go to London. Can I have money for my fare?’ I gave her the money without asking why she was going or where she was to stay. Her parents, in another country would have been shocked and scared if they had known. I had to act as I did, had to show her complete trust, hac to allow her freedom to do what she wanted to do. Other wise I would have beconie identified in her mind with hei unfree past. If anyone asks: Would you have given a chilc of eight its fare? I should answer no. Another foreign gir of ten, letting off steam in her first contact with freedom has spent weeks spitting at other children, laughing at th~ token penny fines imposed by the community, At a Genera Meeting her offences cried so much aloud that no one could think of any way to stop her. In the end I propose that she be rewarded sixpence for entertaining the corn munity. She grinned and blushed, and . . . well I haven’t heard of her spitting since.
It isn’t exactly fair to take the gilt off the gingerbread by abolishing the Verbot, and the method should be used only when others are suffering from the child who is living out its idea of freedom.

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As I say in my Preface, I have also changed my ideas about the importance of politics. I really do not care much what kind of a social and economic system we have so long as humanity is not moulded in youth. This would seem to be taking a very narrow view, for every social system has moulded its youth in one way or another. But I find it impossible to support either Blue or Red, for I am a Pink or maybe better a Violet. I hate Communist Pavlov moulding, but I hate a Western system that allows one third of American newsprint to be devoted to sadistic, hateful comics. I dislike a system that can produce people with luxury cars and mansions when so many are poor and underprivileged, just as I dislike a system in which all must toe one party line, and when I write I, I mean also thousands of noman’s landers who cannot approve of either side wholeheartedly. I guess we would be pink deviationists under either system. In any case it isn’t my pigeon, my cup of tea. I’m a schoolmaster, not an M.P. nor a statesman, so, back to my cobbler’s last.
In my old age I find myself being more sympathetic towards my fellow teachers who work in State day schools. I now see their difficulties more clearly. I still think that there are far too many Blimps among them, too many old wives of both sexes. Too often young teachers are restrained and disciplined by old teachers who should be superannuated. Nothing can be done about these; only time can solve that problem. I think of the many young teachers who like their work and who want to deal with children in a humane and understanding way. Their handicapsfar too large classes, schools built mainly for sitting and learning, the worry of preparing children for that nonsensical examination taken at the age of eleven (but here I may be prejudiced by the fact that I didn’t sit my University Entrance until I was 26, and certainly at the age of eleven would have been unable to pass the easiest of examinations).

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Then they have inspectors and parents to consider; they have to have a discipline forced upon them by the shape of the school and the thinness of the classroom walls. Worst of all the syllabus compels them to deal with heads most of the day, with subject learning, marks, homework correction. One can understand when a harassed teacher with a class of forty falls back on corporal punishment, although one has to wonder why teachers of large classes in Sweden and U.S.A. and Russia manage to have a similar system of large barracklike schools with large classes, and yet not require nor use corporal punishment.
I still hold that teachers as a body are not so well organised assay; doctors or lawyers. That may be to the good when one considers that practically every doctor in the kingdom will accept and use any new drug that the big pots of the profession advocate, accept as yesmen without question or doubt, as they did in the case of M & B, never seeming to ask themselves if the ultimate result of its use might not be dangerous to the human body. But G. B. Shaw dealt efficiently with that aspect in his Doctor's Dilemma. Where the medical organisation scores is in its power. It can unfortunately demand that the community use pasteurised milk. If I fall on a banana skin and break my leg I am rushed to hospital and at once some doctor shoves a spot of something into my arm, and if I protest that I don’t believe in their damned drugs, hardly a hospital doctor will respect my protest. In general the medical profession speaks with one voice, unless something like a National Medical Service comes in question. Teachers never seem to speak with one voice. True we have no highly qualified men who have the power to give their fellows a new educational drug; there are no authorities in education; there is no agreement about what education is or should be. That is good.

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Yet one might think that teachers would speak with one voice on certain aspects, for example they could make a unanimous demand for smaller classes, and I don’t mean a pious resolution passed at an Eastern Conference, I mean a definite threat . . . either we teach sma!ler classes or not at all. There are, alas, very few reforms that teachers would unite about. According to a Gallup Poll the majority wanted to retain corporal punishment. Possibly the most trenchant criticism of the teaching profession is that it tolerates a system of inspection by local and national inspectors. If the medical and legal professions have government inspectors I have never heard of them. It is significant that the teacher ranks below the doctor and the lawyer in social functions; professions that are inspectedteachers, bus conductorscannot have a high social grade. In South Africa, in 1936, I saw that teachers were almost gentlemen; they had a higher social rank than our home teachers have.., and big cars, lots of them. They have inspectors, yes, but I heard teachers addressing the’m as Smith or Jones without the Mister, so that it looked as if they were all of the same social set. Banks are inspected in this country, but I have never discovered what precedence a bank manager has. I hasten to say that social status is of little importance to me per~ sonally. I have none myself and don’t want one. I mention the inferior status of the teacher because all systems seem to have criteria dependent on rank: I take it that a Coinmissar travels soft on the railway, while most Russians travel hard.
For many years I have sensed a certain amount of antagonism among teachers when I lecture to them, this more especially among men teachers. I am not making any claim to beautiful eyes and sex appeal when I say that in this country my audiences consist usually of about 75% women teachers. There seems to be no doubt that British women teachers are keener on listening to lectures on child psychology than our men teachers are . . . not in Scandinavia, or U.S.A. or South Africa, where my audiences were about fiftyfifty, a matter that I cannot explain.

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The antagonism has several sources: teachers do not like to hear anyone with a message that must have a certain amount of the I’mTellin’You element in it (otherwise why lecture at all?): they are frankly jealous of my freedom to do as I please, while they are coffined and confined in their classrooms and by their curriculum. Some of them have become soured: they came out of training college with ideals and dreams of a new way in education, and gradually, disillusioned by their classroom and subject environment, they lost hope and carried on mechanically without ambition.
A criticism frequently made by teachers is that I have not shown any appreciation of the work they are doing, have not shown any desire to go and see that work. It is a just criticism, and I have no defence to offer except the one that I have never gone visiting the Progressive schools either: it is years since I spent a few hours in Bedales; I’ve been to Dartington Hall once or twice, generally when the children were on vacation; I have never visited the Quaker Schools, St. Christopher’s, Letchworth, Long Dene, mainly because a busman’s holiday is not one that attracts me, and anyway, what can one learn in a short visit to any school? When our H.M.I.s came to inspect Summerhill one asked me if I thought two days would be enough to inspect the school; I replied: “Two months would be necessary.” I hesitate to say that my main reason for not visiting other schools is that they have nothing to teach me; hesitate because it sounds so like the celebrated Scots soldier of whom his doting mother exclaimed: “Oor Geordie’s the only wan in the regiment in step.” But it is true. Granted that there are scores of teachers who could show me better methods of teaching than those my school uses, new fascinating ways of having children make their own bagpipes and percussion instruments. The number of enterprising and good teachers is legion, and they shoud be honoured for their original work in their cramping environmenttheir barrackstyle schools. But I say they have nothing to give to me because we are not going quite the same way; on parallel lines perhaps, but we do no meet, because they are in school and I am in a community.

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I suppose it is heresy to suggest that methods of teaching are of little importance. I have never seen any difference between the reading of a child who has been taught on the old Look and Say method, and that of the child who has had the latest phonetic method, nor the difference in arithmetic between the products of the ordinary Long Division teaching and the Long Stair method. Yet no one will deny that a good teacher can make say History or Geography live. That, however, is a case of personality rather than one of method. I used to tell my old friend, Norman MacMunn, that all his work on his elaborate apparatus for teaching History was not worth it. Speaking of heresy I suggest that all the training of all the Training Colleges in the world will not make a good teacher. Teaching is a talent, an art; you either have that talent or you do not, just as you can never be a good dancer after years of lessons if you haven’t got rhythm.
I wrote so much about the sex question in my last book, The Problem Family, that I need not repeat it all in these pages. I see now that my early antilife training about sex has been my heaviest handicap in seeing the question in a good perspective. For many years my views about sex freedom were only what one might call head ones; intellectually I was completely for freedom, and it was only after a long friendship with Wilhelm Reich that I got a measure of emotional freedom about the question . . . I say a measure because, although I can talk openly and seriously about all sides of sex, if there is one person in the group who is known to me as shockable about sex, then I feel embarrassed, and consciously sugar the raw pill by using medical terminology. If a small child says a word like .
but I am not allowed to print it . . . in front of an unknown visitor or the plumber, I feel embarrassed, rationausing that it will give outsiders a wrong impression of the school. My first wife, who had never had a childhood of Calvinism and sex repression, used to laugh and think nothing about the child’s expletive, but my present wife, who had a definite and antilife training about sex has the same attitude, so that perhaps there is more in it than early Calvinism.

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It is in part an identification of self with another, and when recently a visitor began to talk in an anti-Semitic way, I felt very much embarrassed, for one of the party was a Jew.
Association with Reich, the greatest man I have ever known personally, completely ended any interest I had in pornography, and one or two New York psychiatrists have told me the same thing. Whether old age would have killed my interest I do not know. Today my interest in pornography is what may be called a sad one. When a selfregulated child who has had no sex repressions whatever giggles and says: “It’s rude to talk about fannies,” I sigh to think that the influence of another older child, who has not had selfregulation, seems to be counteracting the parents’ prolife attitude. It is appalling to realise how suggestible children are, how prone they are to accept guilt from other children or adults. Nor is it only guilt they accept: they fear to be different from their fellows in any way, thus a Swedish boy often at my school will refuse to talk to his visiting parents in Swedish, fearing and hating to be different from his pals. The longer I live with children the less I feel I understand about them. Kindergarten children when free from moulding have a vocabulary that is largely excremental. Summerhill infants (four to seven) have a joy in shouting out “shit” and “piss.” I realise that most of them were “trained” as babies, and therefore likely to have complexes about natural functions, but one or two have had selfregulation, with no training in cleanliness, no words like naughty or dirty, no hiding of adult nakedness or toilet functions, and yet these selfregulated children seem to have the same delight in the Saxon words as their trained fellows have. I have often wondered whether, if a parent brought up a baby to believe that the nose was dirty and evil, the child would whisper the word nose guiltily in dark corners.
I have discovered with the years that freedom alone does not solve every problem, every mystery about children.

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I never have any doubt about ultimates; I know that nearly every child brought up in freedom will be a good citizen in the end. It is the intermediate stage that is so puzzling. I find so many children who will steal when opportunity offers. As a boy I did not steal because I was so well conditioned; stealing meant a good walloping at the moment and hell fire later on. And many a disciplinarian will argue that freedom from fear of punishment and the decline of religion are responsible for the modern juvenile gangster and the adolescent cosh merchant. In my school I cannot leave the larder or the pocketmoney box unlocked. At Tribunals children accuse others of bursting open their tuck boxes. Even one thief can make a community lock and key conscious, and there are few communities of youth that are honest. Fortyfive years ago I dared not leave a book in my overcoat pocket in the university students’ union, and I have heard rumours that some Members of Parliament hesitate to leave valuables in coats and briefcases. Honesty would appear to be an acquired characteristic that appeared late in man’s development with the advent of private property. What man can honestly tell himself he is an honest man? Possibly the most honestmaking factor is fear. It is not any abstract honesty that prevents me from smuggling or cheating the Income Tax, it is mainly fear that the game isn’t worth the candle, that the disgrace following detection would ruin reputation and work and home. Most people are honest in their dealings with people; it would be easy to slip one of your hostess’s silver spoons into your pocket if YOU thought of doing so. You don’t think of doing so, but you might think of using a return ticket that the collector forgot to punch and collect. Adults make a disstinction between the individual and the organisation whether it be State or privately owned. Children make no distinction; they will pinch from roommates, staff members, shops indiscriminatly... not all children, but many will agree to share the pinched product.

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This means that you find in middleclass children, who are free and in the main happy, the same sort of dishonesty that appears among poorer children as the delinquency that magistrates despair of.. . theft, robbery, coshing. I do not trust my memory enough to say that dishonesty has increased since the second World War. It possibly has, for consciously or unconsciously youth feels insecure. When I was a boy any child could look forward to a long life with security of tenure; today there is in youth a definite feeling which might be expressed in the Bible words: Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Conscription hangs heavy on youth. Many a lad of seventeen thinks and says:
“Why do anything? I’ve got to waste two years in the Forces, so what’s the good of my starting to learn a trade or profession ?“

When there is a law against anything, it must be taken for granted that the law has been made because of a tendency to transgress. In a country with total prohibition there would be no law against driving a car when under the influence. So that the many laws in all countries against stealing, robbery, swindling, etc. are founded on the belief that people will steal when they can. Law breaks down when emotion is strong enough to ignore it, as in the case of rape and sex crimes. No one can calculate how many nagging wives have been allowed to live because husbands feared the gallows, or how many brutal husbands have not been given arsenic coffee for the same reason. No one knows how many people are really honest in that they do not steal: honest in a broad sense rio man is, at least I have never met the man who, shown his hostess’s own paintings, had the honesty or temerity to say: “They are damned awful.”

This dishonesty question has troubled me for years. If I had all the money owing to me from parents these last thirty one years I could easily run a Rolls Royce and travel first class on ships.

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Recently I wrote four letters to exparents who among them owe my school nearly £1,000. “Please,” I wrote, “when are you going to start paying your debt?
Summerhill needs every penny if it is to keep going.”
I did not get a single reply. The recipients always seemed to be ordinary, friendly people who wanted their children to be educated in Summerhill. Each case ran the same course . . . “Sorry I can’t pay you this term but if you can wait, etc.,” and we waited because we liked the children, and only when the bill ran into over £200 or so, did we write and say that we couldn’t afford to hang on any longer, and would they kindly find another school.
They did.
Long and bitter experience has told me that once another school is found, my bills are seldom if ever paid.
It is most difficult to pay for things that are over and done with.
H. G. Wells said that only once in his life did he have his loan of a fiver repaid.
I have usually found that the poorer the parent the more punctilious he or she is in paying debts; parents who save up in the hard way and pay me by postal orders are reliable, whereas some payers by cheque are not. I always do not profess to understand why dishonesty is so prevalent, nor do I think that any parent has ever consciously thought: “I’ll send my brats to Summerhill and won’t pay or them knowing that Neill is a soft mark and won’t chuck them out.” No, I believe the desire for freedom for their hildren was genuine, although many must have wondered f they could afford the fees. The baser ones may have been fortified by the knowledge that I was not likely to take them to court (the soft mark Motif). Hence when I children see without regard for other folks’ property, I am compelled to think of the many respectable parents who have in effect robbed my school larder. But I have a special difficulty. I get into what you might call personal touch with every parent. I am Neill: he is Bill or Tom, and she is Mary or Anne. We go down to the local together sometimes. In bigger private schools the personal relationship is not so likely to arise, and an impersonal secretary sends out the formal bill at the beginning of each term. The wily schools get a lawyer to send them out.

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I hope I am not boring the reader as I try to thrash out the mystery of the money complex. There is an element of parental disassociation between money and Summerhill. I see it in old pupils. At the end of each term when we have our theatre show and dance forty to fifty old pupils generally come down. Since the war I have had to say to them: “The school can’t afford to give you free food now, and you’ll have to pay two bob for your dance refreshments.” Some of them pay it grudgingly.. . and then go down to the local and spend six times that amount. But it is not meanness; it is simply that they have looked on the school as a second home, and recent paying for what they feel should be their right. So it might be with the defaulting parents... Free school? Fine, a home from home for my kids!
I anticipate a question: You have had so much pinched by children and so much lost by parents’ dishonesty, how can you still believe in original goodness? Why go on having freedom in your school when it leads to robbing the pocketmoney drawer?

Well, I suppose that money does not really mean very much to me personally. I regret to say that I have more irritation when a shop overcharges me by sixpence than I have when some parent defaults to the tune of £300. That is mainly because I never saw the £300; it remains phantasy money until it becomes hard cash in the bank. Again I have seen many a child who would pinch at the age of thirteen, grow up to be an honest citizen. The truth seems to be that children take a much longer time to grow up than we have been accustomed to think, and by growing up I mean becoming social beings, I mean that they are primarily egoists until the commencement of puberty, and have not the art of identifying themselves with others. If an adult finds a pound note he will give it to the police because it may have been lost by a poor widow, but a child does not visualise a possible widow and will spend the pound . . . no, that is too sweeping a statement; I have often put that problem to children . . . What would you do if you found halfacrown? All would spend it, but most children say they would take a pound note to the police. It depends on the value. I picked up a packet of Chesterfields the other day when golfing, but I did not trek to the clubhouse to ask if an American visitor had lost any fags.

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Remember that I am writing about children who have not been moulded so much as most children are; no one has given them a gooddeedeachday philosophy; no one has moralised about stealing, although naturally and rightly if pupils or staff lose money, they make a fuss about it at a general meeting. I am saying that the conception Mine and Thine is an adult conception, and that children who are always honest because they have been trained to be honest, are not the proper subjects to study.
There is one most interesting feature about childhood. Tommy, aged thirteen, was a bad problem, thieving, antisocial, destructive. He could not go home one long vacation, so we kept him at school, the only juvenile there for two months. He was perfectly social; we did not have to lock up food or money, but the moment his gang returned he led it in a raid on the larder. Children will jump on furniture in school but at home they respect the furniture. A child alone and the same child in a gang are two different people. School thieving is for the most part a communal affair, and only occasionally does one see the lone crook, always a sly boy with angelic innocence all over his face, who gets away with much because there is no gang rat to betray him. The communal theft would suggest that adventure plays an important part, not only adventure but showing off, enterprise, leadership. Then the question arises: Why do Summerhill children not go on to be criminals after they leave, while many city adolescents go on to become candidates for Borstal? I say that it is because they live out their gangsterdom without fear and punishment and moral lectures, that they are allowed to grow out of one stage of their development and pass naturally on to the next stage. It is not enough to say that my pupils come from good homes while city gangsters have been spoiled by their poor and uncultured environment, for the delinquents of the Little Commonwealth were all from bad city patches, and I never heard of any returning to gangsterdom.

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But I admit that when the youth has to remain in the bad environment he does not have any chance to live out his antisocialness, meaning that the abolition of poverty and slums, combined with the ending of parental ignorance, will automatically thin the Borstals’ population. But that’s enough about honesty. I shall only add my strong conviction that you can never tell a young thief by his face; indeed at the moment I have a boy in the school with such an innocent smile and such clear, blue, guileless eyes, that I have a good suspicion he is not entirely ignorant of the whereabouts of a tin of dried bananas that disappeared from the larder last night.
Have I had to alter my views on selfgovernment in these long years? On the whole, no. I could not visualise the school without it, naturally, for without it we would be back to the old paternal authority. It has always been so popular that it is very unusual for a child of any age to skip a general meeting on the Saturday night. It is our show piece for visitors, but that has its drawbacks, as when a girl of fourteen whispered to me at a meeting:
“I meant to bring up girls blocking the bogses by putting sanitary towels down them, but look at all these visitors.” I advised her to damn the visitors and bring the matter up, which she did. It is an excellent theatre for practising public speaking, and most of the children speak well and directly and without selfconsciousness. Its success varies as the ages of the pupils. Today (Spring, 1953), we are having a spate of bad luck. A bunch of seniors, communityminded, but in no respect leaders as prefects are, left us after passing their School Certificate, and there are very few seniors in the school. The vast majority are at what we call the gangster stage and age, and although they are social in their speeches, they are not old enough to run the community well. They pass any amount of laws and then forget them and break them.

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The few older pupils are by some chance rather individualist, and tend to live their own lives in their own groups, so that the staff is figuring too prominently in attacking the breaking of the rules. Thus it came about that at our last general meeting I launched a vigorous attack on the seniors for being, not antisocial but asocial, breaking the bedtime rules by sitting up far too late, taking no interest in what the juniors were doing in an antisocial way.
I have realised for many years that selfgovernment is impossible unless there is a sprinkling of older pupils who like a quiet life and fight the indifference or opposition of the gangster age. We cannot get away from the patent fact that different ages can live together only by some kind of mutual adaptation. Ages or rather stages overlap; the staff does not like too much noise, but the adolescents do not seem to mind the noise of the juniors, and when one senior brings up the question of juniors noise in the diningroom, the juniors quite truthfully roar their protest that the seniors make just as much noise. To my surprise and delight I have found that under selfgovernment seniors never become a kind of bureaucracy, nor do they ever get any hero worship when they are very good at games. The worship of the Rugger forward in a Public School must be something artificial imposed by a made public opinion . . . and when I recall the small, miserable boys who had to stand in the cold rain to watch the match when Summerhill played a prep school, I understand how the games worship arises.
Communists talk about the class war in society. I have not studied that question and cannot give an opinion on it, but I do know there is a class war in a free school, although it should not properly be called a war; there is no hate in it, no organised aggressionsayagainst staff or seniors. It is a difference of interest that is always there. This week is Fifth of November week, and the noise of squibs and bangers makes me very tired and annoyed, but to the juniors there is bliss in every bang.., and of course my Scottish blood boils to see my precious branches go up in smoke rapidly instead of lighting my fires till Christmas. (Here obtrudes an uneasy memory of Judas’ complaint about the waste of ointment.)

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In the cycle of juvenile interests comes a craze for stilts and I have to give a solemn warning that if pupils take wood from a neighbouring plantation, the police may come in, and in that case I cannot protect the purloiners . . . but the stilts somehow appear from somewhere. By the way I fancy that property owners are much less sympathetic with children than they were when I was a boy. When we wanted a turnip in my childhood we walked into the nearest field and took one and ate it openly, knowing that no Angus farmer would object. We cut down branches for whips and sticks and fishing rods, and no one minded. We made our ha’pennies into pennies by placing them on the line when the 5.20 was due, and no one told us not to, which they should have done. Today these offences are likely to land a child in a juvenile court.
I think I have mentioned in some previous book my conflict with youth over dance records. The modern ones that they love are simply noisy rhythm to me, and although I am a keen dancer, I cannot dance to most of them. I like my own preHitler German records and after much argument at meetings have got a majority ruling that every third record must be one of mine. And that brings me to the argument that democracy by voting is wrong because it penalises the minority. Say the twelveyearolds vote that their bedtime is ten o’clock, and two children of that age like to go to bed at nine. They naturally complain that the others awaken them when they come to bed at ten. The ideal solution would be separate rooms, which our school does not have. In our school we cannot use the Communist method of persuading the minority that it is wrong and must come round to the majority view; we have no party line to toe. In general the minority does not feel strongly about a majority vote, and when it does it has simply to lump it. We have a law against dangerous weapons, a law under which air guns are forbidden.

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The few boys who want to have their air guns in the school hate the law but in the main they conform to it. As a minority children do not seem to feel so strongly as adults do; many an adult feels bitter about our antiquated divorce laws, our laws relating to socalled obscenity, laws which allow books to be sold in Charing Cross Road, and at the same time fine the bookseller and confiscate the same books in Liverpool or Manchester. Many people hate the educational law that religion be taught in schools in a State in which a very small fraction of citizens are churchgoers. I suppose that there are quite a few women who resent bitterly the law of inheritance which favours sons at the expense of daughters. I cannot see an alternative method to our Summerhill democracy. It may be a fairer democracy than the State political one, for children are pretty charitable to each other, and have no vested interests to speak of; moreover it is a more genuine democracy because laws are made at an open meeting, and the question of uncontrollable elected delegates does not arise.
In Summerhill there is one perennial problem that can never be solved; it might be called the Individual v. Community problem. The staff and pupils get exasperated at a gang of little girls led by a problem girl. They annoy people, throw water downstairs on others, break the bedtime laws, in short make themselves a perpetual nuisance. Jean the leader is attacked in a general meeting; strong words are used to condemn her using freedom as licence. A visitor, a psychologist says to me: “It is all wrong. The girl’s face is an unhappy one; she has never been loved, and all this open criticism makes her feel more unloved than ever. She needs love, not opposition.”
“My dear woman,” I replied, “we have tried her with love. For weeks we rewarded her for being antisocial. We have shown her affection and tolerance, and she has not reacted; rather she has looked on us as simpletons, easy marks for her aggression.”

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I do not know the complete answer. In a school you simply cannot treat each child as an individual psychological problem. I know that when Jean is fifteen she will be a social girl and not a gang leader. I pin my faith on public opinion. No child will go on for years being disliked and criticised. One simply cannot sacrifice other children to one problem child. Today we have a boy of six who has had a miserable life before he came to us last term. He is violent, a bully, destructive, full of hate
and the four and five year olds suffer and weep. The community has to do something to protect them, and in doing so must be against the bully. The mistakes of two parents ought not to react on the children of other parents who have given their children love and care. On a very few occasions I have had to send a child away because the others were finding the school a hell because of him. I say this with regret, with a vague feeling of failure, yet I can see no other way.

For many years I tried to combine individual and social attention. I gave my Private Lessons, but I cannot remember that they solved the problem of social aggression. The psychoanalyst has his problem easy; his patient is not thronging his consulting room with a crowd of others. He is wholly concerned with the individual. I do not know enough about the new group analysis, by which individuals analyse themselves by sharing analysis with others. I know only the way of living with others and learning slowly that freedom is something totally different from licence. In the end it works, nearly every time: it is the acute stage that is so tiring and disheartening.
In trying to look back to see if I have changed my opinion because of practical experience, I have to confess that I have been compelled to learn things about children that I did not want to learn. Take the matter of work. I wrote about this in the chapter on Play, and I only want to add this note, that if we want children to work for us we ought to pay them according to their ability. No child wants to collect b~icks for me if I am rebuilding a broken wall, but for a few pence a barrowload they will help willingly.

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I do not like the idea of making a child’s weekly pocket money depend on his doing jobs; after all parents should give much without asking anything in return. My pupils are provided with pocket money by their homes, and they feel it is their right to receive it, but they do not think it my right to demand the carting of bricks as a duty. Duty should be acquired later in life... if acquired at all. The word has so many sinister associations: I think of the women who missed life and love because they felt compelled by a sense of duty to stay and look after old parents, of the married couples who have long since ceased to love each other but go on living together miserably because of their sense of duty. In a minor way many a child at school feels the duty to write home irksome, especially in schools where each child must write his home letter on the Sunday afternoon. I wrote to my own parents every week until they died, and many a time I was gravelled to know what to say, for the simple reason that my interests were far apart from theirs, so that my letters were usually banal... “The weather here is rainy at present.” I grant that duty is possibly not the word to use in this context, for love came in, and I knew that to stop writing for a time would pain and disappoint them, but I also knew that a brother who wrote them once in a blue moon was for some years more appreciated than I was.
The word duty has so many affective aspects. Duty to Queen and Country. Duty that makes millions of young men die on battlefields. Someone said to me recently:
“You say that among old pupils of Summerhill there was only one conscientious objector in the last war, but if children are reared without fear and punishment, why aren’t they all C.Os? Why do they take part in a hate thing like war?” I do not know the answer. “One old pupil replied: “Well, Hitlerism was the very opposite of Summerhill,” but I doubt if that answer is deep enough. I cannot guess what Summerhillians would do if called upon to fight a war against some enemy that they did not disapprove of; it is difficult to think of an illustration, but suppose the war were against Negroes as Negroes or Jews as Jews, then rio doubt they would join with many others from different schools in refusing to serve.

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I have sometimes suggested that our lads joined up because they had lived a community life and felt that when the larger community was fighting for its life, they had to take part. It is not a very good suggestion for this reason that millions who never had a community life with selfgovernment joined up also.
I am aware that this chapter will give a free gift of ammunition to the opponents of freedom for children. Look what freedom does to kids? Makes them selfish little brats, not caring a damn about the rights of others. I deliberately did not put all my best apples on the top of the barrel because if my work has any value it lies in the fortunate opportunity I have had to study children in the raw, and to hide what I have learned would be to make a poor contribution to the vexed question of child psychology. If I say: children are so and so when they are not conditioned from above, I cannot see the answer, for the statement is a scientific one, that is one based on direct observation. But also based on observation is the truth that when they pass through their selfish asocial stage, free children are good people worthy of a good place in society, charitable, balanced, friendly, more like Scots than English but this sweeping statement needs elaboration. There
is a great difference between my countrymen and the English. The other day I went to an auction sale in Suffolk, and being of a chatty nature, I passed remarks to the people around. “Not a bad cupboard, I wonder what it will fetch?” I got mostly grunts in reply, but I know I could go to a roup in Scotland and talk to strangers and be talked to in reply. The working class in England are not so bad; they will often be chummy, but the middle class! In English golf clubs I used to try to pass the time of day with the members. I was frozen out nearly every time, and today would not dare to ask a stranger if he had had a good round. Last time I played in Edinburgh I passed a foursome. “Hi,” called out a breezy stranger, “ye’re liftin’ yer held !“ I was and I thanked him.

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When I used to motor north each summer before the war I was always struck by the difference when I crossed the border. An English tearoom waitress would serve me coldly and politely, but when I crossed the border and had tea in Selkirk the waitress was a human being. “Ay,” she would say, “ye’ll be on yer hoaliday?” No respect, no subservience, no aloofness, just a friendly lassie. And I anticipate the query: “Then why didn’t you stay in Scotland and have your school there ?“ Scotland is too small to have a large enough minority of parents who want freedom for their children, but perhaps John Aitkenhead of Kilquhanity House will disagree with this theory. And Scotland has not the boarding school tradition; its few Public Schools are nearer to Harrow than to Perth Academy. Moreover Scotland still hitches its educational wagon to the academic star, still accepts an uncreative and unemotional curriculum as the proper thing, still believes that an M.A. is an educated man. True, pioneer schools have sprung up in these last few years; they advertise in the New Statesman and Nation, and I wish them the best of luck and like all private schoo~s they will need it too in these days of taxation and struggle. I want to make the point that they came comparatively late in the history of education, and that may have been partly due to the tradition that Scottish education was miles ahead of English for a generation or more, and it certainly was so far as standards of school subjects were concerned. In my youth to pass the Higher Leavings was something to be proud of, and it may have been my inability to reach that standard that made me make a vague assocation of Leavings with pig buckets.
The dog returns to its vomit, and it may be fitting that I give some consideration to my native land. I have never regretted leaving it to work elsewhere; I love to go back on visits but have no desire to live there again. It must be difficult to live in Scotland and think and feel internationally, and that would apply also to the Englishman who knows only his own country.
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Kilts and tartans and bagpipes and the Doric may emphasise nationalism, an nationalism must mean some narrowness. None of us an free from the emotion that is in national feeling: one of our local dustmen comes from Dundee, and it gives me quiet pleasure to hail him of a morning with an: “Ay man, and foo are ye aye daein’ ?“ (odd when translates into “How are you always doing ?“) Here I note that then are at least two Scotlands, East and West, and I hardly realise the pupils and staff who stem from the north an Scottish, because they come from Glasgow way and do no understand my East Coast dialect; I fancy that a pupil from north ofsayInverness would be from a third Scotland.

I wonder how much I have been handicapped by being born in Angus in 1883. The kirk bells and the dreadfu Sabbath when you could only take a walk in stiff collar and cuffs, never being allowed to work or play on the Lord’s Day. The total dark cloud that hid sex, or rathe gave the impression that sex did not exist, so much so tha I cannot recall any mention of masturbation at my father’ village school either direct or by slang synonym. Then the parental emphasis on getting on in life that made a constant nightmare of studying for all sorts of examination ...my father must have roared at me a thousand times “You have no ambeetion! You’ll end in the gutter.” He may have been right; time will tell.
Here arises an interesting question. My Summerhil pupils never show any desire to be pioneers in educatioi or anything else. Is going through the mill a necessiU before one becomes a reformer, kicks against the established norm? Many believe this theory. To me it is invalidate by the fact that my brothers and sisters, my village school mates did not rebel against any system. Wilhelm Reich, it my opinion the greatest pioneer living, had a happy childhood. It would be good to know the childhood background of Freud, Darwin, Huxley; Pestalozzi, Montessori. Bernard Shaw apparently had no special early training in an antilife way. I am certain that early environment is not enough to account for rebels.

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As a callow youth, identifying myself with my eldest brother who was a Kirk of Scotland minister, I aspired to enter the Kirk and studied Greek for a year or two, and it may be that the ambition simply took another form while containing the original aim to save sinners. That is but guesswork. The truth seems to be that we do not know why one becomes a Beethoven, a Shelley, a Pachmann or for that matter a Cnippen or a Hitler, and, not identifying myself with any of these, I have no idea why I became an unorthodox schoolmaster. And I can never answer the question that dozens of visitors ask me ... Why do your pupils not feel themselves inspired to go out into the world and preach and practise freedom for children? A possible answer is that they take their freedom so much for granted that they do not realise how unfrce other children are.

Another frequent question is: When you die who will carry on Summerhill? My usual answer is that it does not matter if Summerhill dies too, for it has done its bit, and like every other living thing must come to an end. I have often wondered if I could find someone who would carry on my work, but I have never found anyone. This implies a gigantic conceit, an exaggerated ego, yet does the man exist who thinks that another could do his job? In my school I do many an odd job that I could delegate to someone else . . . mending locks, repairing chairs, painting doors, simply because of my conviction that the other fellow will not do it so well. I do not really want anyone to continue my work; only an inferior would do so, for any man of original ideas would stamp the work with his own personality and principles. Men should not have successors, at least not in pioneer or experimental work. I did not succeed Homer Lane: I only learnt from him, and if he were still alive I know that we should differ strongly on many points. Reich did not succeed Freud: he went on building on the foundation that Freud had laid, and then extended the structure with completely new foundations. Disciples are dangerous and too often inferior.

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No, Summerhill will die when I die or retire . . . but I can’t retire for I have no more savings left . .. and I say that it won’t matter very much. I am no prophet and any guess I make about the future of education has no special value. It may be that when the present EastWest tension and fear and hate are resolved, by war or compromise or the victory of one political and ideological side or the other, that world education will accept much of freedom for children. I can imagine a student at a Training College in 1990 reading in his textbook :“ In the middle of the century there was quite a lot of experiment in education, and freedom was the watchword. The most famous, or perhaps we should say notorious, of these experimenters was a Scot named McNeill who founded a private school called Summerhill in Sussex. We can smile at his extremities today . . . complete freedom to learn or play, government by the children themselves, no moral moulding, but as we smile we must admit that he did some good by preaching against the futile worship of lessons. Our generation, of course, rejects the idea of complete freedom. Since religious instruction was abolished twenty years ago we have not given up our sacred right to guide children by kindly giving them the benefits of our adult experience. At the same time we must give credit to our McNeills for helping to do away with ancient pestilences like punishment and strict discipline and unnecessary fear in our schools.”
No, I do not think that the world will use the Summerhill method of education for a very long time. . . if it ever uses it. The world may find a better way, for only an empty windbag would assume that his work is the last word on the subject. The world must find a better way, if only for the reason that we know so very little of human nature now. Psychology is still in its adolescence, and, apart from the brilliant work of Reich, little has been done to link up psychology with biology and physics. The future lies in biodynamics, not in the psychology of the unconscious, and a danger is that humanity may have to go through a stage in which the medical men encroach on child psychology with their shots of the latest futile drug . . . X 224 for the child who cannot study maths, Z 145 for the young thief, etc.

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Summerhill is best known in Scandinavia. For thirty years we have had pupils from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, sometimes twenty at a time. The educational standard of these countries is an academic one; the worship of examinations is mad. I said to an audience in Stockholm:
“You come out in your hundreds to hear me talk about freedom but you don’t do a thing about it.” A headmaster answered me later. “You see, Neill, the men who control education do not come to your lectures.” One handicap for them is that private schools are much more under State control then they are with us, and I know that that noble pioneer, Gustav Johnsson, has had much opposition in carrying out his work with delinquents at SkaEdeby. Since Reich lived for some time in Scandinavia there are quite a few teachers and parents who have been influenced by his doctrine of selfregulation, although most of them are not acquainted with his later work on Orgone physics.
I question if Summerhill is well known in Scotland. I was once introduced to the owner of a big bookshop there. He gripped my hand firmly and said: “Man, it is an honour to meet the author of The Booming of Bunkie” (the title of a farcical and poor novel I wrote in 1918). Scots who trek south are never very much honoured in their native land, and any Scot who returns to his home town, expecting to be received as an honoured visitor is ignorant of his own national characteristics.
The way to go back to Scotland is to dress humbly, talk dialect, and on no account mention that England exists, for to many Scots it does not, just as Scotland is only a name to some English people, sometimes a village, so that a Cockney will say: “So you are a Scotchman. I have a friend in Glasgow, John Smith; do you know him?”

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To finish with this question of Summerhill influence in the world, it is widely known in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and possibly to a lesser extent, Canada. But like Scandinavia, they are keen on freedom and do very little about it. I had packed, overflowing halls in South Africa in 1936, mostly teachers, yet I have not learned that South African schools are known for their freedom. They tell me that Australian schools are strictly disciplined, but that, owing to wide, open spaces, children there have mon freedom than our home children. One might be inclined to think that new, young dominions and countries wouk have a fresh outlook on children. Russia has no new out look, nor have our Dominions, and if America has one it is belied by its problem teenagers. An exception may be Israel with its community centres. Accounts give evidencE of much freedom in some of the centres; it could be nation wide if economic poverty did not compel parents to make their children work on the land.

One pleasant feature about Summerhill has been its influence in Japan. Over twenty years ago we had a visit from Seishi Shimoda, an outstanding educationist. He had translated all my books since the days of The Problen Child, and, according to my royalty account, even with modest 5% royalty, a large quantity has been sold. Unfortunately my royalties lie frozen in a Tokyo bank. I gather that the Japanese system of education is a strong and authoritative one, with discipline strict and unbending. It is rather embarrassing to have a line of my books in Japanese on my shelves; one of them entitled 'A. S. Neill and his Work' intrigues me, and my little joke when I as my music teacher to play it for me, hides a curiosity that cannot be satisfied.
There are translations into two Indian languages, with what results I do not know, but make the guess that they do not have much influence, for the new India is almost certain to think that illiteracy is the main problem to be tackled. In 1936 I talked with semiliterate South Africa natives, their one idea was to get a white man’s education school subjects.

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I have put down these facts about translations without illusions. Stop a thousand people in Oxford Street and ask them what the name Summerhill conveys to them. Very likely none of them would know the name. Someone told me he mentioned the school in the staffroom of one of our greatest Public Schools, and no one there had ever heard lt before. Hence one should cultivate a sense of humour about one’s importance or lack of it. Who is important anyway? The main thing is to do your job without any ulterior motive, be it wealth or fame or recognition. No author writes a book for money; he writes because he has to. Only later does he wonder what the critics will say or what royalties he will receive. And no working teacher thinks about rewards in the shape of kudos and parental praise and inspectors’ approval. We all feel that the man who plans and works for a title is an inferior. Bypassing the snobbery angle, my reaction to the offer of being made Lord Summerhill would, I am afraid, be found in the question: “Would it bring me in more pupils ?“ It would, but I should want to hide my diminished head when addressed as: “My Lord !“ I never thought so much of J.M. Barrie when he became Sir James... and it is not sour grapes; a man’s reward is in his work, his love, his friends, and an honour would separate him from these, would put him in a social class that is “higher” and only a man who saw any value in social class would rejoice.

Ministry of Education