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“Summerhill is a story of a modern school.” These are the words of its author, the founder and director of the school, in the opening lines of the book.
Summerhill was founded in 1921. The school is situated in a village in Suffolk, England, about a hundred miles from London. Neill states that when he and his wife first founded the school they had one main idea—to make the school fit the child instead of making the child fit the school. The story of Summerhill is an attempt to show how well this was done and to illustrate the results as manifested by the type of person that Summerhill develops.
Alexander Sutherland Neill is the son of a village schoolmaster in Scotland. He went to a teachers college in England, specializing in English. He graduated with honors in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 1912. After an unsatisfactory experiment with journalism and book publishing. Mr. Neill founded Summerhill. He is the author of 17 books, translated into many languages.
What is Summerhill like? To quote its author: “Well, for one thing, lessons are optional. Children can go to them or stay away from them—for years if they want to. There is a timetable—but only for teachers. 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.”
At another point in the book, Mr. Neill states: “Freud showed that every neurosis is founded on sex repression. I said, I'll have a school in which there will be no sex repression. Freud said that the unconscious was infinitely more important than the conscious. I said, in my school we won't censure, punish or moralize. We will allow every child to live according to his deep impulses.”
Then the author states that he slowly discovered that Freudians did not understand or believe in freedom for children; they confused freedom with license. The idea of freedom, the free child, becomes the cent