thieves and liars and destroyers” who had been expelled from their previous schools, and eventually became “cured by… the freedom to be themselves.” Neill wrote of a boy who, after being expelled from his last school for stealing, arrives at Summerhill and is dumbfounded when Neill offers him a cigarette in his office. In 1921, Alexander Sutherland Neill wanted to make a school “where children could be free to learn if they wanted to learn, and play when they wanted to play, and make their own rules about living.” Summerhill, a democratic school in Suffolk England, started as an experiment in education, with one main idea “to make the school fit the child - instead of making the child fit the school.” Neill wanted children to co-exist with teachers as equals in the way of an orchestra, as opposed to an army barracks style of conventional education.Īt the start, the school took on a fair amount of “problem children. By calling him a damned liar, I was meeting him on his own level.” (A.S. Here was a boy to whom headmasters were stern, moral disciplinarians to be cheated every time. By offering him a cigarette, I was showing him that I approved of his smoking. ‘Thanks’, he stammered, ‘but I don’t smoke, sir.’ ‘Take one, you damned liar’, I said with a smile, and he took one. I noticed that his fingers were yellow with nicotine, so I took out my cigarette packet and offered it to him. He had just come to Summerhill from a typical Public School. “Once I asked a boy of fourteen to come and have a chat with me.
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