Summerhill - Vignesh Prasad

## Highlights - 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. - It is quite safe to have a row with a child when you are equals. - The fact that Summerhill children are so exceptionally friendly-to visitors and strangers is a source of pride to my staff and me. - The function of the child is to live his own life--not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. - she would be perpetually faced with the awful doubt: Which is right, home or school?” - One noteworthy fact is that members of the staff seldom lose their tempers. - The aggressive children we have are invariably those whose homes give them no love and understanding. When I was a boy at a village school, bloody noses were at least a weekly phenomenon. Aggression of the fighting type is hate; - It is not easy to draw the line between realistic carefulness and anxiety. - From the word go, I should have to compromise with what I believe to be truth. - Summerhill is an island. It has to be an island, because its parents live in towns miles apart, in countries overseas. - Although I write and say what I think of society, if I tried to reform society by action, society would kill me as a public danger. - Even the Montessori system, well known as a system of directed play, is an artificial way of making the child learn by doing. It has nothing creative about it. - Every time we show Tommy how his engine works we are stealing from that child the joy of life -the joy of discovery--the joy of overcoming an obstacle. Worse! We make that child come to believe that he is inferior, and must depend on help. - Fifty years ago the watchword was “Learn through doing.” Today the watchword is “Learn through playing.” Play is thus used only as a means to an end, but to what good end I do not really know. - My own criterion of success is the ability to work joyfully and to live positively. Under that definition most pupils in Summerhill turn out to be successes in life. - one simply cannot sacrifice other children to one problem child. - Once, we had a boy of six who had a miserable life before he came to Summerhill. He was a violent bully, destructive and full of hate. The four- and five-year-olds suffered and wept. The community had to do something to protect them; and in doing so, it had to be against the bully. - Only the head is educated. If the emotions are permitted to be really free, the intellect will look after itself. - There is never a problem child; there are only problem parents. Perhaps it would be better to say that there is only problem humanity. - Self-regulation implies a belief in the goodness of human nature; a belief that there is not, and never was, original sin. - Only a fool in charge of young children would allow unbarred bedroom windows or an unprotected fire in the nursery. Yet, too often, young enthusiasts for self-regulation come to my school as visitors, and exclaim at our lack of freedom in locking poison in a lab closet, or our prohibition about playing on the fire escape. The whole freedom movement is marred and despised because so many advocates of freedom have not got their feet on the ground. - It is this distinction between freedom and license that many parents cannot grasp. In the disciplined home, the children have no rights. In the spoiled home, they have all the rights. The proper home is one in which children and adults have equal rights. And the same applies to school. - Children are very wise and soon accept social laws. They should not be exploited as they too often are. Too often a parent calls out, “Jimmy, get me a glass of water,” when the child is intent on an engrossing game. - Everyone realizes the value of sincerity in, say, acting. We expect sincerity from our politicians (such is the optimism of mankind), from our judges and magistrates, teachers and doctors. Yet we educate our children in such a way that they dare not be sincere. - child cannot have real freedom when he hears his father thunder against some political group, or hears his mother storm against the servant class. - But the question arises. Is it possible to approve of children if you do not approve of yourself? If you are not aware of yourself, you cannot approve of yourself. In other words, the more conscious you are of yourself and your motives, the more likely you are to be an approver of yourself. - The one commandment that every parent and teacher must obey is this: Thou shall be on the child’s side. The obeying of this commandment is what makes Summerhill a successful school. For we are definitely on the child’s side--and the child knows it unconsciously. - Not that you should never praise your child. It is good to say to your son, That’s a very nice kite you have made, but the praise in the service of impressing visitors is wrong. Young geese so easily stick out their necks like swans when admiration is floating around. It makes the child unrealistic about himself - Prenatal conditions may have much to do with it. If a child is not wanted, it is quite possible that the mother transfers her own anxiety at the moment of birth to the unborn child. - Goodness that depends on fear of hell or fear of the policeman or fear of punishment is not goodness at all--it is simply cowardice. Goodness that depends on hope of reward or hope of praise or hope of heaven depends on bribery. - My wife and I and the Summerhill staff are loved by the children because we approve of them, and that is all they want. It is because they know that we will not give them disapproval that they enjoy being close to us. - Children’s destructiveness at the age of nine or ten is not meant to be evil or antisocial. Things as personal property are simply not real to them as yet. - to give a neurotic child freedom is an expensive business. - Remember that children feel when they do not know. - For even a hateful emotional response will do when there is no love or emotion. And so the child is beaten--and he repents. But the next morning he begins the same old cycle again. - We put happiness before diet. Visitors to Summerhill generally remark on how well fed the children look. I think it is happiness that makes our girls look attractive and our boys handsome. - In Summerhill, if a child steals and is tried by a jury of his fellows, he is never punished for the theft. All that happens is that he is made to pay back the debt. - However, there is one difference between the ink splasher and me; I consciously like handiwork, but the criminal does not consciously like ink splashing. In handiwork, my conscious and my unconscious are working in unison; in ink splashing, the conscious and the unconscious are at odds. The antisocial act is the result of the conflict. - The parent must exercise patience, secure in the thought that the child has been born good, and that he inevitably will turn out to be a good human being if he is not crippled and thwarted in his natural development by interference. - To censor a child’s companionship is too difficult in most cases. I think it should be done only when a neighbouring child is cruel or bullying. - Every little bully has had his life warped in some way. Often, he is simply doing to others what has been literally done to him. Every beating makes a child sadistic in desire or practice. Children under suppression are cruel in their jokes. - In the slums, the only way delinquents have of satisfying their egos is to draw attention to themselves by antisocial behaviour. - It is not I who cured them. It is the environment that cures them--for the environment of Summerhill gives out trust, security, sympathy, lack of blame, absence of judgment. - Therapy for both adolescents and adults must be desired by the patient. Freedom alone, with no therapy added, will cure most delinquencies in a child. - I realise how difficult it is to cure a child when the home remains a place of lovelessness. Often I have answered a mother’s question, “What shall I do about my child?” with the reply, “Go and get yourself analysed.” - I could, of course, answer the distracted mother, “My dear woman, your son has begun to steal because his home is unsatisfactory and unhappy. Why not set about making his home a good home?” If I were to do this, I might give her a bad conscience. Even if she had the best will in the world, she could not change her son’s environment because she doesn’t know how. What’s more, even if she knew how, she wouldn’t have the emotional capacity to carry out the program. - I sometimes think that strict schools owe part of their popularity to the fact that the pupils delight in going home for holidays. Parents see in the happy faces of their children a love of home, whereas it is just as often hatred of the school. The hate of the child has been bestowed on the stern teachers; the love of the child is thrown lavishly upon the parents. - It is essential for a child’s growth and happiness that home and school should have a single purpose, a combined point of view. - It is really necessary that a teacher be analysed. Analysis is no panacea for all ills; it has a limited scope, but it clears the ground. I think that the chief merit of analysis is that it makes one understand others more easily, makes one more charitable. For this reason alone, I strongly recommend it for teachers; for after all, their work is to understand others. The analysed teacher will cheerfully face his own attitude to children, and by facing it, improve it. - “But stop,” cries the parent, “you can’t do that to us! We have our own rights in life!” I say no, not during the first two years --or maybe four years of a child’s life. The first years must be years of the most careful watchfulness, because the whole of the surroundings are against self-regulation, and one is forced to fight for a child with a conscious intensity.