Neill, A. S. (1883–1973)

Early Life and Career

Neill, one of seven sons of a village schoolteacher, became a problem child for his poor achievement at strictly controlled schools. His teaching career started at age 15 when he worked as a pupil teacher for his father at Kingsmuir Village School. Later, he received a teaching certificate, went to Edinburgh University, and received an M.A. in 1912. Before World War I, he became the headmaster of the Gretna Green School in Scotland. He found conventional school practices extremely oppressive and futile, so he started to write and publish his discontent in his Dominie series (dominie means teacher in Scottish), A Dominie's Log (1915), A Dominie Dismissed (1917), A Dominie in Doubt (1920), and A Dominie Abroad (1923).

Influenced by progressive educator Homer Lane, psychoanalytical innovator Wilhelm Reich, and Freudian psychoanalysis, Neill rejected traditional ideas about how children should grow and learn. [Page 656]He advocated a child-centered theory of education and practiced it in his Summerhill School, believing that all children are good, and if left alone without adults' interference and the coercion of traditional schools, they are capable of self-governing, motivating, and directing their own life and learning. He also promoted personal freedom and rights opposing the imposition of strict Victorian moral standards on children. To him, to be antisex was to be antilife; for this statement he was also highly criticized. He believed it was against the law to punish children physically and to force them to do things not by their own will, except out of consideration for others. He traced many adulthood psychological problems to childhood unhappiness, repression, and deprivation of freedom. Neill, however, had to convince the skeptical world of the value and practicality of his unconventional beliefs and teaching methods. They were absolutely revolutionary and dissenting in the 1920s and described as anarchic at that time.

In 1921, Neill chose Dresden, Germany, to found the Neue Schule (“New School”), an international school to experiment with his unconventional curriculum and methods. This predecessor of Summerhill School was forced to move several times in Europe because of political turmoil and opposition from local authorities. In 1923, the school was moved to a house called Summerhill in Lyme Regis, England, and thus acquired its name. In 1927, Neill moved Summerhill School to Leiston, Suffolk, in England, where Neill lived and worked for the rest of his life.

As a small, coeducational, self-governing boarding school, Summerhill School enrolls a variety of problem children rejected by traditional schools. Children are put in houses by age groups with house mothers. As Neill wanted to make the school fit the children instead of making the children fit the school, he renounced all discipline, all direction, all suggestions, all moral training, and all religious training. At Summerhill, children are given absolute freedom to choose what they want to do and what they want to learn. Neill offered private lessons to students who wished to study with him on self-selected topics. In this do-as-you-please school, class attendance and extracurricular activities are optional. Students hold weekly meetings, Schulgemeinde, to make and enforce rules agreed upon by the entire school community with one vote from each student and teacher. Neill was described as making wonders with disturbed children with his extraordinary blend of gruff humor, intuition, and patience.

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