The ‘do-as-you-please’ school: the origins of progressive education
Civitas, 9 June 2014
In Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas in British schools, teacher, writer and blogger Robert Peal charts how misguided beliefs about education took hold in the 1960s and continue to influence thinking to the present day. In this short extract, he describes an early exemplar of the so-called “progressive” approach.
During the early 1960s, a small independent boarding school about 100 miles from London began to attract visitors from around the world. Its founder and headmaster was an elderly Scot named Alexander Sutherland Neill. Born the son of a village schoolmaster, A. S. Neill rebelled against his Calvinist upbringing and founded his own school in 1921. It would turn him into the leading prophet of Britain’s progressive education movement, and was called Summerhill. By the 1960s, Summerhill catered for around forty pupils, all educated in an environment of total freedom. Pupils could wake and go to bed when they pleased, with days spent attending a series of optional lessons and activities. As Neill wrote, ‘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.’
The school was run through a system of self- government, with rules and decisions made democratically at the weekly General School Meeting. Neill enjoyed hosting individual lessons with pupils, which would begin with him offering them a cigarette to ‘break the ice’. Nude swimming amongst staff and pupils in the school duck pond was encouraged, and Neill once satisfied the curiosity of a pupil who had a ‘sense of sin about nakedness’ by stripping off in front of him, and encouraging a female member of staff to do the same. His solution to pupil theft was to reward the pupil, and if a pupil was caught smashing windows in the school, Neill joined them in their vandalism.
Guiding Neill’s educational philosophy was a blend of romanticism and a radical view of child-psychology, influenced by Sigmund Freud but more importantly the counter-cultural psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Neill believed that children must be freed from adult authority, claiming: ‘My view is that a child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.’ He rejected any of the traditional apparatus of schooling, as he believed that: ‘Children, like adults, learn what they want to learn. All prize-giving and marks and exams sidetrack proper personality development. Only pedants claim that learning from books is education.’
This vision was laid out most completely in Neill’s 1962 book Summerhill, which became an international sensation. It was republished by Pelican in 1968, reprinted ten times between 1970 and 1980, and sold over two million copies worldwide. Neill lectured trainee teachers across the country, and many teachers who fell under his spell during the 1960s went on to reach the highest echelons of British state education. In 2007, Summerhill was voted the ninth most inspiring book published on education by a joint NUT and Teachers TV poll. Tim Brighouse, who until 2007 was the Schools Commissioner for London, is one prominent admirer. Writing an introduction to a book about Summerhill in 2006, he recalled: “There can be very few teachers in education in the UK and trained during the period 1945-1990 who have not heard of A. S. Neill. Neill represented, especially to teacher educators in the colleges of education and the university departments of education, a noble alternative.”
Summerhill failed on any normal measure of what makes a good school. It never achieved high academic standards and Neill always had a stated disdain for public examinations. Neither did it produce any remarkable pupils in non-academic fields, as Neill himself admitted: ‘No, so far no geniuses; perhaps a few creators, not famous as yet.’ Neither did the ‘do-as-you-please school’ result in a community of harmonious co-existence, and it is clear even from Neill’s own writing that Summerhill was an unruly place. Though many contemporaries admired the school, few were willing to place their children in Neill’s care, and the school was only saved from financial ruin in 1961 with an influx of foreign, mostly American, students.
So how did this school, with its chaotic environment, falling roll and academic underperformance, become an inspiration for the future of British education? The answer lies in the temper of the times. Neill had been running his school since 1921, but his ideas only gained widespread admiration in the 1960s. Whilst it is a mistake to see this decade as a caricature of personal liberation and revolutionary enthusiasm, the counter-culture was undoubtedly influential amongst the young graduates who became teachers. In this atmosphere of social and cultural upheaval, when university students adopted the slogan ‘trust no one over thirty’, the old certainties of Britain’s schools seemed redundant. New alternatives were enthusiastically embraced.
This is an edited extract from Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas on British schools, by Robert Peal, which was published by Civitas in May. More details can be found here.