![]() ![]() ![]() The freedom is not licence for unlimited damage. Yet is proves that human freedom can work. Summerhill has mostly had to deal with ‘problem’ children with whom the conventional school system has already failed. True, the bill for breakages is higher than at other schools. They play as much as they want to and learn what they want to. They make up their own rules in a school government and enforce them themselves. The children come to lessons or stay away as they please. Summerhill is based on a simple idea: “To renounce all discipline, all direction, all moral training, all religious instruction.” In just about six months, they are natural, healthy kids who say what they think without fluster or haste.” ![]() After that, they also lose their deference to what they regarded as authority. “It takes at least six months for them to lose their insincerity. And all the time, they have a polite and insincere expression in their eyes and voices. They do all the things they have been forbidden to do in the past: they swear, they smoke, they break things. They become impudent, unmannerly, unwashed. ![]() After a few weeks of freedom, they show what they really are. They glance at me with ‘respect’, which is easily recognised as fear. For the first week or two, they open doors for the teachers, call me ‘sir’, and wash carefully. “Their reaction to freedom is rapid and tiresome. In his practice and in his writings he was the most uncompromising advocate of freedom in education. A S Neill, founder of Summerhill School, died in 1973 at the age of 90. ![]()
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