Education under shelter

healt hat is called laziness is either lack of interest or lack of Fourth International Volume 6 No 3 Prico', 'hinngs Summer 19/0 A JOURNE: OF INTERMATIOAAI MARSI: PUBLISHED DY TU INTIRHATIOMAL COMMITTEE OF TYS FOURIN •KTRNATIONA: 1970 THE YEAR OF LENIN AND TROTSKY schools, children subjects, co-opera and pur pain.

Neill

bewilderment:

make a sIck cruel world?' IMPORTANT READING ITS OF SOVIET OPPOSITION LENIN LUXEMBURG proper personality development' Most of the schoolwork that adolescents do is simply a waste of time, energy and patience?

A. S. NEILL has been trying to put these ideas into practice for the last 50 years and this makes him a pioneer in majority of British even today, still force to work at boring badly taught, rewards tion with team-points ishes non-co-operation infliction of physical founded Summerhill THREE BOOK BOOKS School in 1921. Since then he has sought to run the school without restrictive discipline, on the basis of self-government for students and staff, with school rules being decided by vote at General School Meetings and with the children having the freedom to attend lessons or to stay away.

Neill discovered that when children were not forced to attend lessons they sooner or later attended them voluntarily, and learned more.

He has, of course, no understanding of the real forces operating in the world. He repeatedly confesses his own I am groping. I try in vain to understand why mankind does so much evil. Why does make a silk and bust aid Resolve He tries to resolve this dilemma by leaping from the now acknowledged fact (though it was far from widely acknowledged when he first put it forward) that children need love and esteem in order to be happy and develop—to the conclusion that making children happy by changing teaching methods will solve the problems of war and poverty.

He claims that 'only love can change the world' and even that 'no happy employer ever frightened his employees'!

There is little point, however, in proving that Neill is not a Marxist since he never claimed to be one.

It is more important to examine the value and limitations of his educational ideas and practices.

$j4 AND.

First of all, Summerhill is a little shelter.

It is a fee-paying private school catering for a very small number (about 45) of children of the middle and upper It is over half a century since Neill taught working-class children. To hope that his ideas and practice can somehow spread throughout the state education system is a pipe-dream.

In fact when one headmaster -Michael Duane-introduced a few similar ideas in a LonREVIEWS don Comprehensive School (Risinghill) the school was closed down.

The British educational system has limited aims—to mass produce workers and to develop a. few specialized sçientists, teachers, administrators, etc. to help keep capitalism going. 'Non-pressure' Secondly, Neill's basic assumption is wrong.

His theory is based on the principle of 'non-interference with growth and non-pressure'.

If left to himself without any interference of any kind, ne declares, the child] will develop as far as he is capable of developing' But it is impossible for any child to develop in this way. He is born not into isolation, but into a living, class society with all its contradictions and conflicts.

He can only grow in this real world and develop as the sum total of all his social relations.

Pessimistic

Neill is, in fact, fundamentally pessimistic. He feels that existing society will always dominate:

•Moulded, conditioned, disciplined, repressed child. He is docile, prone to obey authority, fearful of criticism and almost fanatical in his desire to be normal, conventional and correct.

He accepts what he has been taught almost without question and he hands down all his complexes and fears and frustrations to his children.' If this were true, then the working class would be permanently tamed by a bourgeois educational system.

Yet, despite this, when working-class children grow up they find themselves in the tactories, pits and dockyards in constant conflict with the employer.

Despite all the efforts of capitalist education, their class position is more powerful.

They become able, through their revolutionary party and its literature and struggle for theory, to re-educate themselves to challenge and finally to overthrow the old society and in so doing to reject its values and teachings.

Yet, even though Neill's ideas are fundamentally based on a false premise and though it is impossible for them to be applied generally in a society based on private property, it is still true that much of what he says is good.

A socialist education system will owe a debt to A. S. Neill.

LENIN: Speech to the Soviet, 1918 3s. 0d.

By G. Zinoviev 7E