A hundred years ago the Scottish educator AS Neill broke with social convention and a Calvinist childhood of regulation and punishment, declaring that children are innately good, and can grow virtuous and just without being goaded, bribed or threatened. “The function of the child is to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of educators who think they know best.” If a child is difficult it is because he is unhappy, he said: better a happy street-cleaner than a neurotic scholar. Cast out punishment and fear of failure, make learning interesting not compulsory.
It is heady stuff and in the first years of parenthood few of us would gainsay it. We rejoice at a cheerfully grubby toddler in a sandpit learning basic physics and material science, making private aesthetic decisions and (if accompanied by teddy and a bucket of water) probably experimenting with the basics of drama and storytelling. Sometimes we wish it could stay like that: a blissful, undirected private discovery of the world under loving eyes. But we also need children to learn facts and understand ideas, fit into society and earn a living. For most parents, especially now that two pay packets are usually needed to house a family, there must be school. And schooling is an inexact science. No generation has ever got it inarguably right: even the most altruistic and earnest of educators make mistakes, leave scars, stunt or fail to seed good qualities. And the ghost of Neill is always with us, murmuring that every attempt to impose order might be a malign interference.
His immediate legacy is Summerhill School, just down the road from us in Suffolk, where his daughter Zoe Readhead still presides. It is celebrating its centenary still in Neill style: democratic, with children voting on its 400 “laws” to overturn or create them in twice-weekly meetings. Once, they abolished fixed bedtimes but reinstated them when others’ sleep was disrupted.
Neil said “freedom, not licence” involves consideration for others. Children can swear all they like on school premises, but not in the town, dress how they want, and need not go to lessons or take exams unless they want. The experience seems to be that some, especially from stricter regimes in Japan and Korea or who arrive with problems, eschew lessons for a year or so to run round in the woods or follow hobbies but then turn back to the classroom. Indeed in a big row at the millennium, Summerhill was found to reach national average standards at GCSE (admittedly a low bar).
That was a tremendous case: Ofsted under Chris Woodhead tried to bully it into mainstream behaviour, saying it allowed pupils to “mistake idleness for the exercise of personal liberty”. The school complied with demands about accommodation and safety rules but held out against compulsory lessons and testing. Its victorious appeal saw a unique moment at the Royal Courts of Justice: children perching on the steps and alleyways, and the presiding judge handing over the chair to a girl pupil and dismissing lawyers while pupils discussed the final terms. The ministry withdrew its complaint and accepted that Ofsted must respect the school’s philosophy. Which it does to this day, possibly gritting its Goveian teeth.
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It’s a small private boarding school and not to everyone’s taste: when we considered it in the 1980s we concluded that enough of Neill’s humane, child-centred attitude had fed through into the mainstream, at least in our village school before the era of central diktats, competitive league tables and enforced formulaic “literacy hours”. But we always respected Summerhill and the spirit of Neill. And now on the far side of lockdowns, lonely remote-learning and panic about how many months children have “fallen behind”, it is interesting to reflect on what the Covid disaster may have taught us.
Especially because in this centenary year Zoe Readhead has published views which some, misunderstanding her father’s ideals as producing feral children, find startling. She says that many parents raise “spoilt brats” in the name of emotional freedom, letting them be “dangerous, irritating or unpleasant to other people”. They may push them through exam-mills, but project their own anxieties and ambitions, give undeserved praise and over-direct every activity.
She has also previously spoken against lonely screen-time, and some years ago admitted that some kids were arriving so over-indulged that the school community had to teach them to abide by the common rules. She also bravely remarks that we are “creating a generation convinced they have mental health problems” rather than helping children understand that pain, sadness and disappointment are normal.
Summerhill will always be controversial, niche; some children have not suited it, others been saved by it. But Ofsted in 1999 was wrong and the court was right: we need this quirky outlier and its alarming freedoms, a pinch of salt in an educational world which uses cold business words like “value-adding” and “underachieving”.
The pandemic years may even have brought useful lessons: about children’s ability to self-start and manage time without bells, about collaboration, even some democracy in household matters and perception of how a community’s needs compete with personal comfort. Home-schooling will have taught many, earlier in life than usual, to understand and forgive the limitations of their parents. Deprivation can be productive, as grapevines thrive in hard soil. If closed schools meant some households temporarily became miniature Summerhills for good or ill, it has at least been educative.