The Scottish psychologist Alexander Sutherland Neill (1883-1973) is most famous as the founder of Summerhill School and as the developer of its radical child-centered theory of education.

A Failure at School

Born in Forfar, Scotland, on Oct. 18, 1883, Alexander S. Neill received his early education in his father's one-room, five-class village school. Because of his inability to progress very far in education, he was the only child in the family who was not sent on to Forfar Academy.

At the age of 14, Neill went to work as an office boy in an Edinburgh factory, but he became so lonely and homesick that his parents allowed him to return home. He then worked as an assistant in a dry-goods shop. Shortly thereafter, he became a pupil-teacher in his father's school, where he remained for four years. He then spent what he described as three wretched years as a teacher in a school in Fife, received his teaching certification, and moved on to a school where discipline was easier and his life was somewhat happier for two years.

At the age of 25 Neill enrolled as a student of agriculture at Edinburgh University. Although he passed his first year's program, he said he understood little of the lectures. Changing his major to English, he came under the influence of the scholar and prose stylist George Saintsbury and received his master's degree in 1912. He then worked briefly in journalism and did editorial work for an encyclopedia.

Progressive Influences

At the beginning of World War I, Neill became headmaster of a coeducational school in Scotland which prepared its students for work on farms and in domestic service. It was at this time that he first became convinced that conventional education was oppressive and futile.

Neill voluntarily left the school for a brief sojourn as an artillery cadet. There he met Homer Lane, one of the early advocates of "progressive education," who introduced him to Freudian psychology and convinced him that the best way to deal with a recalcitrant or delinquent child is to allow the child to govern himself. Following the war Neill had a brief appointment at the King Alfred School in Hamp-stead, where he tried to implement his theory of self-government for children. He was forced to resign in 1920.

Creating Child-Centered Education

After a short stint as coeditor of the New Era (the organ of the New Education Fellowship), Neill and several others founded Summerhill, an international school near Dresden, Germany, in 1921. Political turmoil in Dresden caused him to move the school to the Austrian Tirol. However, the peasants in that area and the Austrian government became upset with his unorthodox curriculum and methods, and after seven months of harassment, he removed the school to England in 1924, establishing it in the town of Leiston in Suffix.

In his influential 1960 book Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, one of 21 books he wrote, Neill recalled that he and his first wife, Ada, wanted "to make the school fit the child instead of making the child fit the school." To do so, he wrote, the founders renounced "all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious training." Ada died in 1944, and Neill remarried the next year, to Edna May Wood. They had one daughter.

Neill founded Summerhill as a small, coeducational, self-governing boarding school. Class attendance and extracurricular activities were optional. There was no teaching method, leaving children free to learn by their own impulse. Rules were decided in a weekly general assembly, at which each student and teacher had one vote. The children were segregated in housing by age groups, with a house mother for each age.

Neill believed many of children's problems resulted from poor sex education. He tried to demonstrated how the family created hates and jealousies. Neill denied that the atmosphere at Summerhill was "permissive." He did not believe in giving children everything they wanted nor in allowing them to violate another's rights, but he cautioned against moral judgments. He argued that other systems of education did nothing more than coerce children into the neurotic image of their elders.

The Summerhill Legacy

In the 1960s and 1970s, Summerhill became a model for child-centered schools in the United States and elsewhere. Neill became the center of controversy over traditional versus alternative education. Unwavering, Neill noted: "People so often fail to understand that freedom for children does not mean being a fool about children." He titled his 1972 autobiography Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! after a child's taunt that he turned into a comic tradition at Summerhill. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing the book in the New York Times, noted Neill's "practical good sense about the worthlessness of most education, and his passionate desire to connect life with learning, thinking with feeling" as well as "his patiently reasonable, flawlessly logical, but always witty arguments against repression and punishment" and "his careful distinction between freedom and license." Neill once said that "the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child" and said his role at Summerhill was to "sit still and approve of all the things that a child disapproves of in himself."

Further Reading

Works by Neill include, A Domine's Log (1916); A Domine Dismissed (1917); Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960); The Booming of a Bunkie: A History (1919); A Domine in Doubt (1922); A Domine Abroad (1923); The Problem Child (1927); The Problem Parent (1932); That Dreadful School (1937); The Free Child (1953); and Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!" (1972). Studies of Neill and his career include Leslie R. Perry, ed., Bertrand Russell, A. S. Neill, Homer Lane, W. H. Kilpatrick: Four Progressive Educators (1967) and Summerhill: For and Against (1970).

1883–1973, English educator. After teaching at state schools in Scotland, Neill became dissatisfied with traditional education. In 1924, he set up the progressive coeducational Summerhill School at Leiston, England. Among the school's experiments were optional attendance, a school parliament, and no religious instruction. Neill's works include The Problem Child (1927), The Problem Family (1949), and Summerhill (1960). He ideas, although controversial, continue to be debated.

(1883–1973)

Alexander Sutherland Neill flouted educational convention with utopian faith in individuals' ability to direct their own learning. His romantic Progressive beliefs concerning students' rights and freedoms, his refusal to conform to popular moral and intellectual standards, and his emphasis on social and character development led him to found his own school, Summerhill, in 1921. Neill's radically humanistic, Freudian-based work later joined with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's natural philosophy to greatly influence the free/alternative schools movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Early Life and Career

A. S. Neill was born in Forfar, Scotland. Working as a pupil teacher in his father's school, Neill's experiences as a young educator were colored by traditional educational expectations: strict discipline, teacher-centered learning practices, and excessive control. At the age of twenty-five, Neill enrolled in Edinburgh University, where he studied English and later became a journalist. In 1915, while working as headmaster, or dominie, at a small school in Scotland he wrote the first book in his Dominie series, A Dominie's Log. This five-book series, which also included A Dominie Dismissed (1917), A Dominie in Doubt (1921), A Dominie Abroad (1923), and A Dominie's Five (1924) represented Neill's informal diary interspersed with stories and observations of people, places, and adventures. Most importantly, Neill used the series to explore his thoughts concerning freedom and children - chronicling dramatic transformation in his own ideology from his early teaching experiences.

Although Neill's vocabulary in A Dominie's Log connected to traditional psychoanalysis, it was not until he visited "Little Commonwealth," educator Homer Lane's community for delinquent adolescents, that he became familiar with the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. There, Lane introduced Neill to Freud's New Psychology, to the notion that children possessed innate goodness, and to the pedagogical practice of student self-government. Neill's emerging understanding of education seemed to be heavily influenced by other psychologists of his time as well, including Wilhem Stekel and Wilhem Reich.

Dissatisfied with traditional schooling - with its lack of freedom, democracy, and self-determination - Neill began searching for a place to establish his own school and to experiment with his developing ideas. In 1921 Neill became involved as co-director of the Dalcroze School in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, Germany. Part of an international school called Neue Schule, the Dalcroze supported the study of Eurythmics. Yet despite the school's bohemian atmosphere, Neill soon began to feel that the staff was more interested in education than children, and that the conflict between freedom and rigor was untenable. Additionally, the political climate after World War I caused financial difficulties for many of his students' families and contributed to feelings of anti-Semitism. When parents began removing their children from the school Neill decided it was time to leave Germany.

Once again, Neill was off in search of a site for his experimental educational venture. Neill, together with Lillian Neustatter (who later became Neill's first wife), opened a school in a scenic Austrian mountaintop town called Sonntagsberg. However, conflicts with townspeople over the teaching of religion combined with financial difficulties caused Neill to dismantle the school and renew his search for a suitable location.

Significance to Education

By 1923 Neill had returned to England, to the town of Lyme Regis in the south, to a house called Summerhill. There, he re-established his experimental school and enrolled a variety of so-called problem children in Summerhill. In 1926 Neill departed from his Dominie series and wrote The Problem Child. In this book, Neill clarified his ideology of freedom as a protest of his experiences both as a child and as a pupil teacher. As a result of this publication, Summerhill garnered greater attention and more students.

The school moved in 1927 to Leiston in the county of Suffolk, which would continue to be its location into the twenty-first century. Despite the move, Neill's ideals and aims remained firm: allowing children freedom to grow emotionally; offering children power over their own lives; giving children the time to develop naturally; and creating a happier childhood by removing fear of and coercion by adults. Summerhill offered numerous activities to help students work toward the above aims. In particular, students took part in private lessons or therapy sessions with Neill. Moreover, students participated in Schulgemeinde, or weekly community meetings designed to help them define limits and establish community rules. Following the lead of Homer Lane, Neill viewed these meetings as a way for children to transfer their emotions onto the community. Because freedom and self-determination were of utmost priority, the learning of lessons became a necessary concession at Summerhill. As such, Neill was less concerned with hiring teachers with strong pedagogical skills than he was with hiring teachers who cared about children and who followed the aims and vision of Summerhill.

Neill's first wife, Lillian, died in April 1944. Soon after her death, Neill married Ena Wood, and together they oversaw Summerhill until Neill's death in 1973. Upon his second wife's retirement in 1985, Zoe Readhead, the daughter of A. S. Neill and Ena Neill, took over as headmistress of Summerhill.

Critics argue that A. S. Neill interpreted education in an overly romantic and apolitical fashion, suggesting that offering a stimulating environment with minimum direction was not a proper way to run a school. Also under review are Neill's beliefs about his Freudian-based pedagogy as well as those concerning the innate goodness of children. Despite his critics, Neill's book Summerhill (1962) gained him a worldwide audience.

Bibliography

Croall, Jonathan. 1983. Neill of Summerhill. New York: Pantheon.

Hemmings, Ray 1972. Fifty Years of Freedom: A Study of the Development of the Ideas of Alexander Sutherland Neill. London: Allen and Unwin.

Lamb, Albert. 1992. Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood. New York: St Martins.

Neill, Alexander Sutherland. 1928. The Problem Child (1926). London: McBride.

Neill, Alexander Sutherland. 1937. That Dreadful School. Middlesex, Eng.: Jenkins.

Neill, Alexander Sutherland. 1968. Summerhill (1962). Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin.

Neill, Alexander Sutherland. 1972. Neill, Neill Orange Peel. New York: Hart.

Neill, Alexander Sutherland. 1975. A Dominie's Log (1916). New York: Hart.

— DEBRA M. FREEDMAN, J. DAN MARSHALL

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