Summerhill was founded in the year 1921. The school is situated within the
town of Leiston, in Suffolk, and is about one hundred miles from London.
Some children come to Summerhill at the age of five years, and others as late
as fifteen. The children generally remain at the school until they are sixteen
years old. We generally have about twenty-five boys and twenty girls.
The children housed by age groups with a housemother for each group. The intermediates
sleep in a stone building, the seniors sleep in huts. Only one or two older
pupils have rooms for themselves. The boys live two or three or four to a room,
and so do the girls. The pupils do not have to stand room inspection and no
one picks up after them. They are left free. No one tells them what to wear:
they put on any kind of costume they want to at any time.
When my first wife and I began the school, we had one main idea: to make
the school fit the child - instead of making the child fit the school.
I had taught in ordinary schools for many years. I knew the other way well.
I knew it was all wrong. It was wrong because it was based on an adult conception
of what a child should be and of how a child should learn.
Well, we set out to make a school in which we should allow children freedom
to be themselves. In order to do this, we had to renounce all discipline, all
direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.
My view is that a child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without
adult suggestion of any kind, he develop as far as he is capable of developing.
Logically, Summerhill is a place in which people who have the innate ability
and wish to be scholars will be scholars; while those who are only fit to sweep
the streets will sweep the streets. But we have not produced any street cleaner
so far. Nor do I write this snobbishly, for I would rather see a school produce
a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar.
What is Summerhill like? Well, for one thing, lessons are optional. Children
can go to them or stay away from them - for years if they want to.
The children have classes usually according to their age, but sometimes according
to their interests. We have no new methods of teaching, because we do not consider
that teaching in itself matters very much. Whether a school has or has not a
special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long division
is of no importance except to those who want to learn it. And the child
who wants to learn long division will learn it no matter how
it is taught.
Children who come to Summerhill as kindergarteners attend lessons from the
beginning of their stay; but pupils from other schools vow that they will never
attend any beastly lessons again at any time. They play and cycle and get in
people's way, but they fight shy of lessons. This sometimes goes on for months.
The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them.
Our record case was a girl from a convent. She loafed for three years. The average
period of recovery from lessons aversion is three months.
All the same, there is a lot of learning in Summerhill. Perhaps a group of our
twelve-year-olds could not compete with a class of equal age in handwriting
or spelling or fractions. But in an examination requiring originality, our lot
would beat the others hollow.
A few years ago someone at a General School Meeting (at which all school rules
are voted by the entire school, each pupil and each staff member having one
vote) proposed that a certain culprit should be punished by being banished from
lessons for a week. The other children protested on the ground that the punishment
was too severe.
Summerhill is possibly the happiest school in the world. We have no truants
and seldom a case of homesickness. We very rarely have fights - quarrels, of
course, but seldom have I seen a stand-up fight like the ones we used to have
as boys. I seldom hear a child cry, because children when free have much less
hate to express than children who are downtrodden. Hate breeds hate, and love
breeds love. Love means approving of children, and that is essential in any
school. You can't be on the side of children if you punish them and storm at
them. Summerhill is a school in which the child knows that he is approved of.
In Summerhill, everyone has equal rights. No one is allowed to walk on my grand
piano, and I am allowed to borrow a boy's cycle without his permission. At a
General School Meeting, the vote of a child of six counts for as much as my
vote does.
But, says the knowing one, in practice of course the voices of the grownups
count. Doesn't the child of six wait to see how you vote before he raises his
hand ? I wish he sometimes would, for many of my proposals are beaten. Free
children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon.
Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.