A. S. Neill

Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441115904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

A. S. Neill was probably the most famous school teacher of the twentieth century. His school, Summerhill, founded in 1921, attracted admiration and criticism from around the world, and became an emblem of radical school reform and child-centred education. Neill claimed that he was a practical man, but this book reveals that Summerhill expresses a comprehensive and distinctive set of ideas. Whether he wanted to be or not, Neill was an important educational thinker with a powerful influence on current educational approaches and philosophy. A. S. Neill is the first book to examine this philosophy of education in detail. It begins by showing how Neill's fascinating life story gives clues to the origin of his ideas, and why they mattered so much to him. It goes on to explore the main themes of his philosophy, showing how they relate to the work of other great educational thinkers, and how they are novel. It also discusses whether there are lessons that could and should be learned by other schools from the original, alternative 'free' school of Summerhill.

Chapter 1

Introduction

It has been 90 years since Summerhill School was founded by a gruff yet charismatic Scottish teacher. Summerhill—often called the most famous school in the world—continues to capture the attention of government, the media, and the general public. For some, the rather ramshackle little school is a holy place; for others, it represents all that is wrong in alternative or progressive or radical schooling. Whether its founder, Alexander Sutherland Neill, or subsequent Summerhillians intended it to be so, the school has become an emblem of a debate about the nature of education that has gone on for centuries.

There is an irony at the heart of the story. Summerhill is a very small private school in sleepy East Anglia, on the East Coast of England. Yet, its name and philosophy have been heard, at various times during the last 90 years, around the world. There seems little doubt that the “Summerhill experiment” was influential in the progressive educational revolutions of the 1920s/1930s and of the 1960s/1970s in the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, and the more gradual process by which classrooms became much more humane places for children. Yet, remarkably, despite the fact that the school has changed very little during its existence, it is still widely considered radical and controversial. The conservative educational writer Dianne Ravitch claimed that America is now a nation of Summerhills, and while not intended as a compliment, this sentiment certainly captures the sense of the school as representative of a particular tradition of education. Whether this impression is accurate or not is a matter for some debate. However, the power of metaphors and symbols lies not in their truth but in their potency.

This seems to explain, in part, the context of the events of 1999 and 2000, when the English government tried to close the school. State interest in Summerhill was not new: it is the most inspected school ever in the United Kingdom, and has hosted government inspectors almost from its inception. Most of the resultant reports reveal a sense of bewilderment on the part of the visitor. There is much about Summerhill that continues to stand in stark contrast to schools in general. Most decisions, including the most important ones, are made during an egalitarian meeting in which every young child has the same say as that of an adult. Attendance at lessons is voluntary. Relationships between adults and children are characterized by an almost total lack of authority. Generally, the school embodies values that, despite otherwise radical changes to most Western schools, would be shocking to most visitors.

Neill, himself, oversaw Summerhill for such a long time that the identity of the man and his school, many people argued, became merged. Such was the power of his personality that it was often simply assumed that Summerhill would not be able to survive his death. They were wrong. At the time of writing this book, Summerhill celebrated its 90th anniversary, and has survived nearly 40 years since its founder’s passing.

Another common argument is that an analysis of Neill’s thinking on education is doomed to failure. Neill the teacher, it is sometimes suggested, is an expression of a natural gift that is beyond theorizing. He was a gifted teacher, so the story goes, and his body of work was merely an extension of his personality. He also stood outside of any recognized educational school of thought. His innate understanding of the psyche of children extended beyond philosophy or psychology. Consequently, Neill’s writings offer, at best, a crude picture of his thinking and practice. For his part, Neill usually encouraged this perspective. He often described himself as “a doer rather than a thinker”, and much of his writing was prone to an affected disdain for abstract “theory.” For example, in “The Problem Family,” Neill wrote: “I am no thinker, no philosopher; I do hard work with children, doing mostly the right thing without thinking out the reason behind my action, working by intuition . . . whatever that may mean” (Neill 1949, p. 152). The implication of comments like this is clear: Neill was a savant; he was a gifted teacher who was guided by his innate wisdom, rather than the fluff and nonsense of academic theory. Not surprisingly, many commentators have taken Neill at his word and concluded that Neill lacked a coherent philosophy of schooling, and that Neill and Summerhill were educational oddities that defy analysis.

This book seeks to understand the Summerhill phenomenon. Following the pattern set by earlier volumes in the Continuum Library of Education Thinkers, the discussion begins with an intellectual biography that traces the origins of Neill’s main ideas and practices, and the invention of Summerhill School. In doing this, it tracks Neill’s progression from an academic failure to an educational celebrity, and Summerhill from a small school for a tiny group of students in Germany to a uniquely controversial school whose influence stretched far beyond its English home. It goes on to discuss the central ideas of Neill’s work—Happiness and Interest, Freedom and Authority, Learning and Teaching—and in doing so, suggests a new way of understanding the underlying unity and coherence of Neill’s thinking. Finally, the book evaluates the reception and relevance of Neill’s philosophy of education.

I was first introduced to Neill and Summerhill while I was a student teacher, through his best-selling compilation “Summerhill” (1962). That summer, quite by chance, I stumbled across a copy of Neill’s very first book, “A Dominie’s Log,” and read it in one sitting. The first book suggested to me the idea that alternatives to the normal way of running schools were not just conceivable, but also workable. The second book painted a beguiling portrait of a way of working with children that was entirely different from the rather brutal form of schooling I had experienced as a child, and was now expected to learn how to deliver as a teacher.

Later, while studying the philosophy of education, my initial infatuation with the Summerhill ideal changed increasingly to frustration as I struggled to get behind the plethora of rhetorical tricks and ticks that make up much of Neill’s writing style. He was a uniquely funny writer on a usually very unfunny subject, but I was not sure if that was all there was to his work: entertainment. Or did Neill’s gentle tales hide important lessons? Perhaps more importantly for me at the time, I wondered whether the philosophy of Summerhill could survive outside that rarefied air. Was there anything here for state school teachers? If not, was Summerhill no more relevant than “Swallows and Amazons” or “Billy Bunter”? It did not help that almost all of the books I was reading at this time either totally ignored Neill’s contribution or used it as a case study in muddled thinking. More damage was done when a major television documentary represented Summerhill School in an extremely unflattering way. I know that I was not the only person painfully disillusioned by that portrait.

Looking back on those times from the vantage point of a few decades, I have no doubt that my early reading of Neill affected my teaching. The story of Neill’s early attempts to find a more humane approach to his work as a “Dominie” within the draconian world of Calvinist Scotland seemed to reflect the struggles of many idealistic young teachers, but writ large. I am less sure how far it influenced my thinking about education. Writing this book has offered me an opportunity to consider precisely this question.

Chapter 2

Intellectual Biography of Neill and Summerhill

A dominie’s bairn

George Neill was the dominie, or parish school master, at the one-room, five-class village school in Kingsmuir, near Forfar, on the East of Scotland. His father was called MacNeill, but George had decided to anglicize the name to Neill on his way to lower-middle class respectability. Within the rigid hierarchy of Scottish village life at the end of the nineteenth century, the dominie was an important man. Normally placed below the Laird (the local landed gentry), doctor, and minister, in tiny Kingsmuir, the dominie was “head mon of the village” (Croall 1983a, p. 10).

George’s wife, Mary (née Sutherland Sinclair), had trained and worked as a teacher, but propriety dictated that she abandon this career when she married. George and Mary had 13 children, of whom 8 survived.

Alexander Sutherland Neill was born on 17 October 1893. He was the fourth son. Allie, as he was known to everyone, was by all accounts a quiet, kind, and compliant boy, who nevertheless caused his parents to despair for his almost complete lack of interest and ability in academic matters. Looking back from a distance of 70 years, he wrote, “I never had any interest in lessons and could not learn” (1972a, p. 31). Yet, he was “obedience personified” (ibid., p. 61). He would stare at his books for hours, but nothing seemed to stick: “in the long run, my passive obedience backfired. Obedience made me stare at Allen’s Grammar, but something inside me negatived my passive response by refusing to allow me to learn anything” (ibid.).

Allie Neill’s childhood was characterized by fear and failure. It was not that he was not intellectually curious. On the contrary, he ceaselessly explored the local area with his mates: “my pockets were always filled with bits of string, chunks of old iron and brass, and nails, screws” (Neill, cited in Skidelsky 1969, p. 124). But these things were of no value in the education system represented by his father.

Allie’s relationship with his father is difficult to judge. He used his autobiography to record: “My father did not care for me when I was a boy. Often he was cruel to me, and I acquired a definite fear of him” (Neill 1972a, p. 31), and “Father did not like any children; he had no contact with them. He did not know how to play, and he never understood the child’s mind. The boy he admired was the boy who could beat the others in lessons; and since I never had any interest in lessons and could not learn, I had no hope of gaining Father’s interest or affection” (ibid., p. 10). “Licks” of the tawse (a leather strap with two thinner “fingers” at one end) were common in George Neill’s classroom, according to one of his ex-pupils (told to Croall 1983a). If there was no occasion to hit a child, Mr Neill would sometimes create one: “He’d sat a group of us to do some sums, and you had to put up your hand when you’d finished. The last one would get the strap—and you’d have a strapping for any you got wrong” (ibid., p. 17). Such behavior seems shocking, but perhaps it becomes more understandable when it is remembered that the dominie had to control and teach up to 139 pupils (with one assistant and one pupil-teacher) in a building that was designed for 25 pupils, and his income depended completely on his pupils’ examination success (Hemmings 1972). George Neill was remembered rather fondly by many of his ex-pupils (Croall 1983a, p. 2). And his son’s portrait in his early books is overall of a rather kind but pedantic man, strict in the classroom, but not excessively so (e.g., Neill 1916; 1932). He even hints as much in his autobiography, when he writes, “I am convinced that my father showed me how to be a good teacher. Though he had little humour, he had some imagination, and he could make history live for his pupils” (1972a, p. 166). It is the former image that has come to dominate in the literature on Neill’s early childhood (e.g., Saffange 2000). His father, so the story goes, was a bully whose demands for obedience drove the young Allie toward radical ideas (e.g., Allender and Allender 2006). The difficulty with this view is that not even in the midst of his rhetoric flourishes did Neill show his father behaving particularly badly toward his son, and compared to some of the dominies Allie met in later years, George was positively benign. Theirs was a drama created within a draconian, inhumane education system, in which both struggled to comply, and from which Allie Neill was ultimately purged.

The Scottish school system adhered to a pedagogy of “ram it in, cram it in, little heads are hollow/belt it in, strap it in, more to come tomorrow!” (Hendrie 1997, p. 1). Scottish teachers of his era, it used to be joked, taught the “Three Rs”–Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic—with the help of the “Three Bs”—Belt, Blackboard, and Bible (Anderson 1995). The harsh and sometimes brutal teaching against which Neill later reacted was, therefore, reflective of Scottish educational practice of the time. Religion infused almost everything that took place at school, and the dominie was the revered figure responsible for ensuring that this was the case. While the Scottish school system developed what might be called a more “progressive” style, the dominie remained a revered figure well into the twentieth century, as is reflected in memoir, novel, and poetry (Holmes 2000). There was a playground rhyme chanted in schools which encapsulated the archetypal Scottish schoolmaster in very similar terms:

Mr Rhind is very kind,

He goes to Kirk on Sunday.

He prays to God to give him strength

To skelp the bairns on Monday.

(“The Dominie’s Happy Lot,” Wingate 1919, pp. 60–1)

This verse captures in a few lines the key elements in the educational tradition represented by George Neill and hundreds of other dominies: the importance of religion and the central role played by the school in socializing and civilizing the children.

It is easy to imagine George Neill’s exasperation at his wayward son. Allie was no “dunce” or fool, but he was unable to keep up with his classmates, and “He must have roared at me a thousand times, ‘You’ve got no ambition! You’ll end in the gutter’” (Neill 1953, p. 156). Scottish classrooms were dominated by arithmetic, spelling, Latin, and teachers were paid for their results. Young Allie’s predicament was recounted some years later in the semiautobiographical novel “Carroty Broon”:

He turned his attention to the blackboard with its tiresome requests to find the Lowest Common Denominator, but his interest was elsewhere; he was wrong in every sum, because his interest lay in a folding pair of nail scissors he had found in the gutter in Tarby. They were very rusty, and his whole soul longed for a free hour and a sheet of emory-cloth, with bath-brick to finish up with. (Cited in Croall 1983a, p. 15)

Allie had great affection for his mother, who was a busy homemaker, but she was also a snob: “Lower-middle-class respectability was perhaps the keynote of [the Neill’s] family life” (Skidelsky 1969, p. 123). Mary Neill was even more ambitious for her children than was her husband. As the family of the village dominie, “We sons of the school house had a difficult role to play. We spoke broad dialect among our peers, but when we crossed the threshold of the house we automatically broke into English proper” (Neill 1931, p. 12). Mary Neill insisted on standards of behavior that inevitably and deliberately set her children apart from their peers, who were “mostly children of farmworkers, poor, ill-fed and many of them, often ragged, mischievous” (1953, p. 92). Allie’s inability to perform at a level that would be expected of a dominie’s child brought embarrassment on the family, and that, Mary Neill made very clear, was not acceptable.

Just as the young Allie disengaged from his classroom studies, so he was repelled by the severity of his moral upbringing that took the shape of the harsh Puritanism of Scottish Calvinism: “The general idea . . . is the conception that man is a sinner by birth and that he must be trained to be good” (Neill 1926, p. 139). The Scottish poet Edwin Muir—who, decades later, was to become a friend and ally of Neill—said of John Knox, the great Calvinist reformer: “As I read about him in the British Museum I came to dislike him more and more, and understood why every Scottish writer since the beginning of the eighteenth century had detested him” (Muir 1993, p. 226). Calvinism, according to Muir, “turned Scotland into a Puritan country, to remain so until this day” (Muir 1929, p. 100). It had no place for the merciful or the generous and “Judged by the best in humanity, its figures seem narrow, sick and almost pathological” (ibid., p. 116). The potency of the peculiar melancholy of Calvinism lay not in its formal expressions, like the Kirk (church), the sabbath, or religious training in school; it was more subtle and more pervasive: “It was in the air, an atmosphere of negation of life . . .” (Neill 1972a, p. 44).

The Calvinist insistence on denial of the body, the importance of the intellect over the imagination, and, above all else, the moral obligation of obedience, was harsh medicine for young Allie. In later life, he frequently spoke and wrote about the joys of play and friendship spoilt by the ever-present threat of divine retribution. This fear was fostered as much by family life as at church: “We were not specifically taught religion; it was in the air . . . an atmosphere of negation of life” (Neill 1972a, p. 44). He recounts a dramatic experience when he was 6 years old, for example, when he and his younger sister Clunie stripped and were examining each other’s bodies. The two children were caught by their mother who beat them severely and made them kneel down to ask God’s forgiveness. When their father came home, he beat them again, and locked Allie in a dark room: “So I learned that of all sins, sex was the most heinous” (Neill 1972a, p. 80).

All in all, Allie’s time at school became progressively uncomfortable, saved only by the opportunities to play that were available to him and his friends once the school bell rang. His schooling did not so much end as fade away. When they reached 14 years of age, pupils left George Neill’s village school to attend the Forfar Academy in the next town. The Academy had a strong academic reputation, counting among its alumni J. M. Barr...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• A. S. Neill and Summerhill: Foreword by James Tooley
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Intellectual Biography of Neill and Summerhill
• 3 Key Themes of A. S. Neill’s Work
• 4 The Reception and Relevance of A. S. Neill’s Work
• 5 Conclusion
• References
• Appendix I: Reading Neill and Summerhill
• Appendix II: Neill and Summerhill Chronology
• Index
• Copyright