A. S. Neill

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).

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

Alexander Sutherland Neill
Neill on his birthday
Born	17 October 1883 (1883-10-17) Forfar, Scotland
Died	23 September 1973 (1973-09-24) (aged 89) Aldeburgh, Suffolk, England
Occupation	Educator, author
Known for	founding Summerhill School, advocacy of personal freedom for children, progressive education

Alexander Sutherland Neill (17 October 1883 - 23 September 1973) was a Scottish progressive educator, author and founder of Summerhill school, which remains open and continues to follow his educational philosophy to this day. He is best known as an advocate of personal freedom for children.

Contents 1 Personal background 2 Educational philosophy 3 Life at Summerhill 4 Influences on Neill's thought 5 Criticisms of Neill 6 Neill's educational legacy 7 Works 8 Published Correspondence 9 Portrait bust of A.S. Neill 10 References 11 External links

Personal background

Neill was born in Forfar, the son of a schoolteacher. After acting as a pupil-teacher for his father, he studied at the University of Edinburgh and obtained an M.A. degree in 1912. In 1914 he became headmaster of the Gretna Green School in Scotland. During this period, his growing discontent could be traced in notes which he later published. In these notes, he described himself as "just enough of a Nietzschian to protest against teaching children to be meek and lowly"^[1] and wrote (in A Dominie's Log) that he was "trying to form minds that will question and destroy and rebuild".

Educational philosophy

Neill believed that the happiness of the child should be the paramount consideration in decisions about a child's upbringing, and that this happiness grew from a sense of personal freedom in the child. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood, and the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child, was responsible for many of the psychological disorders of adulthood.

The main focus of educational interest and research at that time was the question of how best to produce obedient soldiers who would uncritically follow orders in battle,^{[citation needed]} so Neill's ideas, which tried to help children achieve self-determination and encouraged critical thinking rather than blind obedience, were seen as backward, radical, or at best, controversial.

Many of Neill's ideas are widely accepted today, although there are still many more "traditional" thinkers within the educational establishment who regard Neill's ideas as threatening the existing social order, and therefore controversial.

In 1921 Neill founded Summerhill School to demonstrate his educational theories in practice. These included a belief that children learn better when they are not compelled to attend lessons. The school is also managed democratically, with regular meetings to determine school rules. Pupils have equal voting rights with school staff.

Neill's Summerhill School experience demonstrated that, free from the coercion of traditional schools, students tended to respond by developing self-motivation, rather than self-indulgence. Externally imposed discipline, Neill felt, actually prevented internal, self-discipline from developing. He therefore considered that children who attended Summerhill were likely to emerge with better-developed critical thinking skills and greater self-discipline than children educated in compulsion-based schools.

These tendencies were perhaps all the more remarkable considering that the children accepted by Summerhill were often from problematic backgrounds, where parental conflict or neglect had resulted in children arriving in a particularly unhappy state of mind. The therapeutic value of Summerhill's environment was demonstrated by the improvement of many children who had been rejected by conventional schools, yet flourished at Summerhill.

Strongly influenced by the contemporary work of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, Neill was opposed to sexual repression and the imposition of the strict Victorian values of his childhood era. He stated clearly that to be anti-sex was to be anti-life. Naturally, these views made him unpopular with many establishment figures of the time.

Life at Summerhill

As headmaster of Summerhill, Neill taught classes in Algebra, Geometry and Metalworking. He often said that he admired those who were skilled craftsmen more than those whose skills were purely intellectual. Neill held that because attendance was optional, the classes themselves could be more rigorous. Students learned more quickly, and more deeply, because they were learning by choice, not compulsion.

Neill also had special "private lessons" with pupils, which included discussions of personal issues and amounted to a form of psychotherapy. He later abandoned these "PLs", finding that children who did not have PLs were still cured of delinquent behaviour; he therefore concluded that freedom was the cure, not psychotherapy.

During his teaching career he wrote dozens of books, including the "Dominie" (Scottish word for teacher) series, beginning with A Dominie's Log (1916). His most influential book was Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960) which created a storm in U.S. educational circles. His last work was his autobiography, Neill, Neill, Orange Peel! (1973) He also wrote humorous books for children, like The Last Man Alive (1939).

A. S. Neill was married twice; his second wife Ena Wood Neill administered Summerhill school with him for many decades until their daughter, Zoe Readhead, took over the school as headmistress.

Influences on Neill's thought

Neill's biggest mentor in education was the British educator Homer Lane. Neill was also an admirer and close friend of psychoanalytical innovator Wilhelm Reich and a student of Freudian psychoanalysis, though in his autobiography he wrote that "Much of what I thought I had learned from the psychoanalysts has disappeared with time". ^[2]

Another major contributor to the field of Libertarian Education was Bertrand Russell whose own self-founded Beacon Hill School (England) (one of several schools bearing this name) is often compared with Summerhill. Russell was a correspondent of Neill and offered his support.

Criticisms of Neill

Many within the educational establishment felt threatened by Neill's work, and criticism of Neill was correspondingly harsh, and often inaccurate. Many published ad hominem attacks accusing Neill of various failings including naivety and unrealistic idealism, or even downright moral indifference. Neill was similarly criticized for bringing notions of Freudian repression into an educational setting.

Such critics often focused on what they (falsely) claimed to be the laxness of sexual morality at Summerhill.^{[citation needed]}

Neill's educational legacy

Neill's notions of freedom and education, considered controversial in their time, influenced many of the progressive educators who came after him.

Modern advocates, such as John Taylor Gatto, John Holt and many others in the unschooling movement, democratic school movement, free school movement and homeschooling movements, have taken Neill's ideas further and updated them, providing energetic and radical critiques of the compulsion-based schooling which is still prevalent in most countries.

Due to the continuing international corporate demand for employees who can think critically and be self-motivated, as well as to the growing demand from parents for a system of education which reflects their ambitions for their children, compulsion-based systems in many countries^{[citation needed]} are now gradually being reformed along much the same lines that Neill recommended.

Summerhill School, which Neill founded, has recently (2007) been accepted by the UK educational establishment, in particular OFSTED, as providing a good quality of academic education for children. Summerhill has also been recognised by the United Nations for its exceptionally good treatment of children.

"The convention of the Rights of the Child makes particular reference to children's rights to participate in decisions affecting them and Summerhill, through its very approach to education, embodies this right in a way that surpasses expectation." - Paulo David, Secretary, UN Committee on the Rights of the Child

Works

• A Dominie’s Log (1915)
• A Dominie Dismissed (1916)
• Booming of Bunkie (1919)
• Carroty Broon (1920)
• A Dominie in Doubt (1920)
• A Dominie Abroad (1922)
• A Dominie’s Five (1924)
• The Problem Child (1926)
• The Problem Parent (1932)
• Is Scotland Educated? (1936)
• That Dreadful School (1937)
• The Problem Teacher (1939)
• The Last Man Alive (1939)
• Hearts Not Heads in the School (1945)
• The Problem Family (1949)
• The Free Child (1953)
• Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (Preface by Erich Fromm) (1960)
• Freedom, Not License! (1966)
• Talking of Summerhill (1967)
• Children's Rights: Toward the Liberation of the Child (with Leila Berg, Paul Adams, Nan Berger, Michael Duane, and Robert Ollendorff) (1971)
• Neill, Neill, Orange Peel! (1972)

Published Correspondence

• Record of a friendship: the correspondence between Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936-1957 (1982)
• All the Best, Neill: Letters from Summerhill (1984)

Portrait bust of A.S. Neill

A.S. Neill sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait^[3] in clay. The correspondence file relating to the A.S. Neill portrait sculpture is held in the archive^[4] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist. Bronzes are in the public collections of The College of Orgonomy^[5], New York and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (collection reference PG2204).

References

1. ^ Neill, A.S. (1915). A Dominie's Log. READ BOOKS, 2007 Page 66. ISBN 1406763535, 9781406763539
2. ^ Neill, A.S. (1973). Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. pp. 163. ISBN 0-297-76554X. 
3. ^ portrait head of A.S.Neill image of sculpture
4. ^ http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=584 HMI Archive
5. ^ The American College of Orgonomy

• Neill, Alexander S.: Summerhill School - A New View of Childhood. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996 ISBN 0-312-14137-8.
• Croall, Jonathan: Neill of Summerhill - The Permanent Rebel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 ISBN 0-7100-9300-4
• Croall, Jonathan (ed): All the Best, Neill. Letters from Summerhill. London: André Deutsch, 1983 ISBN 0-233-97594-2 (A collection of letters by Neill to people like H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, Paul Goodman, Homer Lane, and others)
• Walmsley, John. Neill & Summerhill: A pictorial study. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969 ISBN 0-14-080134-0
• Sims, Hylda: Inspecting the island. Ipswich (UK): Seven Ply Yarns, 2000 ISBN 0-9538797-0-4 (A novel by an ex-Summerhill pupil)

External links

• Summerhill School
• Page of Summerhill and A. S. Neill (German)
• Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing - A.S.Neill (full text 276 KB zip) Story of the first free and democratic school in the world
• "Freedom, not License!" by A.S.Neill (full text) – Hart 1966
• Autobiography by A.S.Neill: Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! – A Personal View of Ninety Years, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973; Quartet, 1977. ISBN 0 297 76554 X (full text)

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