The following two photographs are taken from the first Summerhill brochure following Neill’s death.The BBC, when headmasters die do not disturb the ether to inform us. On Monday night this week we had the exception: A. S. Neill had died on Sunday, Headmaster of the controversial boarding school where boys and girls didn’t have to attend classes and where there was no homework and corporal punishment was unknown, etc, etc, etc. From the tone you wouldn’t have been surprised if the announcer had added, ‘so much Old Hat, and so troublesome.’ I wonder if any Scottish youngsters listening in instead of doing homework had a glimpse of an inaccessible heaven: no homework, no belting, not even lessons if you didn’t want them. Heaven indeed, a dream only, better forget it. The grandparents of some of them, however, would smile with remembered pleasure, thinking of A Dominie’s Log and all the other Dominie books that made Neill famous 50 years ago. They made you laugh, but they made you think. The man came near the mark. Now, all but 90 the Dominie is dismissed.
I think it was Jankel Adler who said Picasso had knocked on the door of every artist’s studio in Europe, if not in the whole world. A disturbing bloke. We could think of A. S. Neill as the man who knocked on the door of every classroom – maybe keeking his toe in the door to the delight of the captive boys and girls.
More than a touch of irony seems to mark the scene now: who would be further from the image of a Scots dominie than this man who rightly earned the title of the best loved schoolmaster in the world? Or could have had so small a school and made so big an impact on the world of education? Or what better example of the prophet with no honour in his own country? Patience: even now a committee of the E.I.S. (Educational Institute of Scotland) is gathering evidence in an attempt to phase out corporal punishment in schools. Old Neill would smile – wryly, I reckon. But truly he sowed the seeds of ideas and even if the soil of Scotland is cold some harvest is in a school with the name of his own Summerhill that another Scots dominie, with the same east-coast origins and the same kind od human warmth, is fighting to save a crop. (John, here, is referring to R. F. Mackenzie.)
The old man is dead – a kind of daddy of a movement is lost. We can only feel sad, yet his work was done and on the personal front we should not be sad; he was almost 90 years old; he led his rebel school of freedom for 50 years – half of our boasted century of compulsory schooling. He saw his writing translated into a dozen European languages as well as into Japanese. The world of students, literally, made a track to his door in Leiston, Suffolk. The man was a giant and he strode his world but gently. Glowing, loveable, giant. Those who knew him will never forget him. Those who would know him are lucky that this year sees the publication of not only of an autobiography but of a sound study of his work by Ray Hemmings and a set of essays from Americans for and against Summerhill, where world figures like Bruno Bettelheim, Eric Fromm, Paul goodman write of the real meaning and significance of Neill’s life-work, and demagogues like Max Rafferty of California Schools twist the message.
Neill has the last word – he founded Summerhill. Neill was a real pioneer visionary in the field of education. His school in Suffolk in the years before the war was the most stimulating experience a teacher could hope for, anticipating by half a century the kind of programmes and approaches that are being used today.
Neill was the real educational visionary in the first half of this century. He was there 50 years before the other schools well on the . . . . to see how useless and even harmful our State schools and traditional patterns of so-called education where he had the warmth, the humour, the courage to establish children’s community and live in it, fearlessly offering a real living target to the . . . . . . . . . Neill wasn’t out to practice or prove new methods of learning or teaching new classroom tactics – ‘to lever more useless work out of kids’ as he once said, commenting on a new method. Ahead of us all he was willing to take on children as persons on an equal footing, to grant them honest and reasonable freedom . . . . to let them make mistakes. He was physically a great man.
Neill’s writing and talking all the way across the world for the last 35 years must have been a greater . . . . of real thinking about education and growing up than the rest of educational theory put together. The man was a giant when he strode the world, gently, a loving, loveable Scots giant. We should not be sad that he is dead. His work was done. This year, his 90th has seen the publication of his autobiography.
