An occasional series on great Scots unjustly ignored or forgotten.
“If the emotions are free the intellect will look after itself.” A.S. Neil (1883 – 1973)
The dark days
I think it prescient to discuss teacher and dominie [headmaster] A.S. Neill at a time politicians are jumping all over the Scottish Education system for no valid reason than to score political points, anything to derail the cause of self-determination.
(For readers abroad: Scotland has its own education system distinct from England’s.)
It’s helpful to begin by putting Neill into historical context. Neill was a Forfar man. He left school without qualifications but that didn’t stop him becoming a journalist before the First World War, and then schoolteacher and author. A quizzical intellect helped jettison a bleak, harsh Calvinist background where guilt and divine authority commanded the day.
When he was in charge of Summerhill, his own private school, (founded in Lyme Regis, later at Leiston, Suffolk) Scottish education was still the envy of the world as it had been since the Enlightenment, with one glaring exception – we used corporal punishment.
To progressive teachers, and some parents, the use of the ‘belt’ was considered regressive, a hangover from religious discipline, hellfire and damnation. Most Christian schools, which meant all state schools, argued they had the right to hit pupils.
The ‘tawse’ or ‘Lochgelly’ was a thick leather strap brought down hard on the open palm to quell boisterous behaviour or a stray unwanted remark, sometimes across backsides by over-zealous teachers suffering from repressed paedophilia. Sleeve pulled up, hand stretched out, the tawse could blister a wrist for days when used with too much length and force. England retained the cane, again used on hands or buttocks.
Published research came to unsurprising conclusion ‘belting’ or ‘strapping’ children did little lasting harm, but it did no good whatsoever. There had to be other methods to sanction unacceptable behaviour, such as loss of privileges or removal from class.
Do as you are told
Examinations of all sorts were mandatory, from late primary school onwards. Everything learned had to be tested. Critical thinking was not encouraged. When in power the Labour party imposing one sets of tests, the Tory party removed them and imposed another set. Little consideration was given to slow learners, or ‘modified’ pupils as they were called, an offensive euphemism for pupils categorised as unruly or uncooperative.
Life in a state school was one of a top down hierarchy. The headmaster ruled the roost, heads of departments ruled their junior colleagues, and the janitor was a pal to everybody. Teachers were expected to give up to eight sermons a day. School students were expected to listen carefully to each and only speak if spoken to. Overworked, unimaginative teachers wrote term reports on each pupil’s progress explained by meaningless hackneyed phrases, ‘could do better’, or ‘shows some improvement.’ Homework was every evening.
Can anybody imagine a pupil saying to their teacher, “Sir, I think that’s a stupid assignment, I’d rather do something else.” That opinion would meet with a sudden chill from the other pupils and probably the belt. And that rigor, that conformity, that obedience goes on through college and career, and so on.
It was also a time of psychoanalysis, child-centred theories, and classroom experiments in progressive educational thinking. Educationists in England, Europe, and the USA were publishing studies and data faster than a pupil could smoke a cigarette behind the toilets. It was a time of exploration.
For those attending state school it was sit at a desk, face a teacher at a blackboard, and after an hour, move to another classroom to another desk and teacher, and a different subject. Teachers gave seven or eight sermons a day.
Now and then an inspirational teacher appeared on the horizon, bucking the system and overturning the rules – no homework! He was cherished. They told us we were special, that we had ability, that we could achieve. We all have one to whom we owe a great deal.
A.S. Neil was a great inspirational dominie, and much more. He was an innovator, a radical, and unlike educationists of his day, he put his ideas into practise.
Neill teaching out of doors
A philosophy to annoy the establishment
Simply put, pipe smoking Neill, a social democrat, anti-authoritarian, believed a child should not be forced to learn, but should in preference be left to find their own way. A child’s happiness was paramount. In many respects Neill was right, for the children placed under his care grew to trust and love him, and become well-adjusted adults.
Neill’s own handling of pupils was controversial. He was friendly and relaxed with pupils yet would treat some with disdain, answering back in the same manner an angry pupil talked to him. He was abrasive, quick to tell a pupil he was acting the idiot. One educationist avers Neil’s technique ‘simply awful.’
Neill’s attitude appeared intolerant, stooping to the language of delinquents, but it taught children to understand hard criticism didn’t necessarily mean the other person disliked you. A tongue lashing will teach you more than a lashing from hard leather.
Do as you like, kids
On arrival, this maxim of ‘do as you please’ was met by new recruits with utter incredulity, followed by scepticism, uncertainty, and when the offer was proven true, pure joy. You didn’t have to attend classes. You could play outside all day. Every day.
There was no corporal punishment. Exhibit bad behaviour, have a fellow pupil complain about you, and a meeting was called where everybody was equal, teachers and Neill too, one person one vote. Self-governance was Neill’s principle guiding doctrine.
Bad behaviour was discussed, peer pressure imposed. Students – he disliked the term ‘pupil’ – participating in weekly community meetings helped them define limits to their actions and establish community rules.
Summerhill School, where play comes first
A revolution
In a state system hidebound by suffocating uniformity and conformity, Neill’s ideas were revolutionary. It did not take long for the school’s fame to spread, and its notoriety to reach the ears of British traditionalists and state inspectors of schools. He gathered as many fierce critics as he did admiring adherents.
Many in the educational establishment felt threatened. Some lashed out in intemperate language, others cloaked their criticism in research papers. Yet, on each visit inspectors could find no damning evidence to justify closing the school. In fact, some remarked on how motivated pupils were to the task of learning.
Figures visited Summerhill in the 1960s, when child-centred ideas were coming into state education, and observing that it was all very utopian but no pupils educated this way would be able to adjust to life in the outside world. Clearly they had not met – as I have – the academics, scientists, artists, social and humanitarian workers, charity founders, skilled tradespeople and not high-achieving but contented former pupils. Nor did they see the value of Summerhill for pupils such as book illustrator John Burningham, who was sent to 11 schools before Summerhill, where he was, finally, happy.
Then, in 1999, Tony Blair’s government decided he could not tolerate this tiny private school. It was given six months to enforce learning or be closed down. A notice of complaint was issued which, if upheld, would have meant closure. Not if Summerhill pupils could help it. They went to an independent schools tribunal and took over court 40, where they argued the case for their school and won.
Neill understood from his own days at school, and his university where he studied English literature, that left to your own devices an individual (and children) will gravitate to a situation where they acquire knowledge of one sort or another. Natural human inquisitiveness soon overrides boredom and repetitious activity. The curiousity natural in the young motivates them to learn new things, to study new subjects. The school did not deviate from the fundamental principles of holding a weekly school meeting where matters of concern, children proving troublesome or breaking rules, and ditto staff, could be brought up by anyone, and all had equal votes in decision making. To Neill, this was the heart of a democratic community.
The working of the human mind
Neill’s vocabulary in A Dominie’s Log [see Recommended Reading below] connected to traditional psychoanalysis, but it was not until he visited “Little Commonwealth,” educator Homer Lane’s community for delinquent adolescents, that he became familiar with the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. There, according to Lane, he “introduced Neill to Freud’s New Psychology, to the notion that children possessed innate goodness, and to the pedagogical practice of student self-government.”
Neill’s emerging understanding of education seemed to be heavily influenced by other psychologists of his time as well, including Wilhem Stekel and Wilhem Reich, the latter with whom he corresponded until Reich’s demise at the hands of the American right.
Not a school uniform for twenty miles
Good versus evil
Neill felt human nature was innately good. He believed a child should be left to grow without the imposition of good and bad morality, and that in time the child would become a virtuous adult. He created a self-regulatory atmosphere, giving them the space, time and empowerment to make their own decisions.
This did not mean a disregard for children’s safety. Neill created opportunity for the children to discover things for themselves, and without overt guidance from teachers, all within the confines of the school.
As far as pupils free to miss lessons was concerned, boredom and the isolation of being outwith the herd soon motivated pupils to choose classes and then knuckle down to study. Summerhill boasted a large percentage of pupils who went on to university, a claim verified by school inspectors. And that was in the days of few universities, exceptionally high entry standards, and for the most part, lecturers of proven intellectual ability. Criteria for selection was stringent, back in the day.
Flaws not tawse
There were two flaws in Neill’s philosophy. The teacher had to attend the classroom. They did not have freedom to dog classes. That was a practical rule. Neill could hardly hold open-classroom lessons – the teacher absent for the day.
Secondly, it was Neill’s school. He could be the dictator if he wanted, and indeed on a couple of occasions when anarchy broke out at successive meetings with no solution in sight to the problem debated, he imposed a decision. “Dictators arise”, he said “when anarchy prevails.
“I am only just realising the absolute freedom of my scheme of Education. I see that all outside compulsion is wrong, that inner compulsion is the only value.“
Neill’s legacy and followers
Few of Neill’s acolytes continued his work after his death. His family maintained Summerhill, with Neill’s daughter as its headmaster. Others influenced by Neill included John Aitkenhead of Kilquhanity House School in Castle Douglas, Dumfries and Galloway, (Aitkenhead worked at Summerhill) and Michael Duane, and R. F. MacKenzie. Nevertheless, Neill is considered among the ten most influential educationists of the twentieth century.
A.S. Neill was not a great man, but he was an extremely interesting one, a notable progressive in the renaissance mould. He was captivated by ways to nurture happiness in youth, a joy in life and learning that they would retain throughout adulthood, and that is admirable. He lived a long and productive life, from 1883 to 1973. His ideas were never taken up by state education, but he influenced thousands of teachers. I was one.
RECOMMENDED READING
This essay cannot begin to do justice to the man or his work. If you can find copies in second-hand book shops or Amazon Books, Neill’s own writing is still topical, his main work, A Dominie’s Log. This five-book series, which also included A Dominie Dismissed (1917), A Dominie in Doubt (1921), A Dominie Abroad (1923), and A Dominie’s Five (1924) represented Neill’s informal diary interspersed with stories and observations of people, places, and adventures. There are also works analysing his methods and achievements.
POST SCRIPT
One of my school report cards said, “The boy is perceptive and intelligent, but suffers from flights of imagination, which must be curbed at all costs.”
My teaching days in Glasgow were an affirmative experience. I never owned a belt or used one. My lecturing days were very happy … until Westminster stepped in and instructed their lackeys in Scotland to follow new thinking, which was very old thinking.
Margaret Thatcher began the rot by elevating businessmen as the new barons of society, the captains of industry and all prosperity that flows from their genius. Education became slave to corporate need.
Respect for the teaching profession is at rock bottom, teaching no longer a prestigious occupation, successive assaults on teacher integrity generally a ploy to soften acceptance of more tests and control.
Today, in the case of bankster’s bonuses, we’re told to respect the sanctity of contracts, just not contracts for teachers or doctors. Collective bargaining is considered a social evil. Were he alive today Neill would rant against restraints on personal freedom, the loss of democratic rights, but he’d praise the relaxed atmosphere in contemporary schools, and a student’s right to express themselves more freely than in the past.
There is an ironic parallel in Neil’s doctrine of self-governance, and the way Scotland is treated by unionists. We are a ‘dreadful nation.’ The British press and their pundits invariably referred to Summerhill as that ‘dreadful school.’ The progress of human achievement is littered with reactionaries hell bent on controlling their fellow man and woman.
Grouse Beater 
Thanks again, Gb. In truth I hadn’t heard of AS Neill to my shame. Your article starkly illustrates how almost from the cradle itself, our very minds are subverted by petty authoritarians. I’d say your old report speaks volumes on the establishment mindset when imagination is viewed as a flaw to be purged from the young. Sadly, a great deal of popular mainstream culture gives the impression that it was conceived for the same purpose.
Ha!
Brilliant stuff GB.
As it happens, I did recognise the name, and remember reading about him many years ago. Didn’t the Edinburgh Review devote an edition (or a goodly part of one) to him back in the 90’s? In any event, a very interesting man indeed.
On the ‘belt’. I have no idea what age you are, and whereabouts you taught, but my music teacher (this would be, er, 1975/6) was the great singer Peter Mallan. On our first day in his class he set out the rules he expected us to obey, raised his tawse (which was unbending) and brought it down across his own shin with such a crack that every one of us jumped – he didn’t bat an eye.
It wasn’t until considerably later, after much debate and double-checking with older brothers and sisters, that we were able to confirm he had a false leg. Did the trick though – I don’t recall him ever using the thing, and he was a wonderful teacher.
I had a colleague who kept his belt across his shoulder and whipped it down on an open palm as if a gunslinger.
A woodwork teacher always began a new class of students by placing a large piece of 2×2 wood between two desks, and with a single swipe of his tawse, smashed it into two.
They required vacation time to rest, and therapy to help them discard their macho shell.
Another burly colleague threw a young boy half his weight and size into my classroom and onto the floor, demanding I hold him down while he flayed him with his Lochgelly. I lifted the boy up and took him to the headmaster’s office for a more considerate hearing. For a month I was ostracized by my fellow teachers.
You were expected to support grown men and women against the cheekiness of small boys and girls from poor homes.
Enjoyable respite from the frontline grind of our political struggle on Wings.
People like AS Neill who buck the trends and run the risk of being labelled heretics always interest me, so long as they’re not just attention seekers, which he obviously wasn’t.
The images of the tawse brought back some not so enjoyable memories.
Still its nice to look back and reminisce about my long lost youth for a moment instead of fretting about the doing I’m going to get at work tomorrow.
Thanks for all your efforts and contributions, Grouse Beater
And thank you, David, for the incentive to write more.
Great, interesting piece.
I had a primary school teacher with 3 belts. A secondary school teacher carried his belt over his shoulder, under his jacket, and whipped it out with much drama. Even as a young teen, I could tell he really enjoyed the power.
My mother used a belt at home, they were a feature of my childhood.
See my earlier reply to a reader – perhaps we had the same history teacher!
At my church primary school (1947 – 1953) there were two versions of corporal punishment: class teachers would use a 12” ruler (sometimes two together) to strike a pupil’s hand; the headmaster would employ a cane upon exposed buttocks, but in the privacy of his study.
Secondary education brought more varied weaponry: some more traditional masters (all teachers were male) retained a love of the cane, with some having just a single treasured specimen kept in a cupboard while others had veritable arsenals, differing in length and diameter, kept in racks like so many billiard cues.
The more inventive among them, however, favoured personalised approaches to physical chastisement. A French teacher used a size 11 gym shoe (far too big to have been his own); a maths teacher would flog using a knotted skipping rope; and, by far the worst, a chemistry master preferred a rubber bunsen burner tube.
Targets were always naked buttocks, but in front of the whole form, and it is clear to me now that many of those men were certainly pederasts.
But for lasting damage I think the prize would have gone to a Latin master who despised physical punishment and instead deployed towering sarcasm, scorn and cutting wit, much to the amusement of the rest of the form but to the deep shame of the recipient. That kind of punishment leaves no transient physical scars that can, at least, be flaunted as evidence of supposed heroism or bravado. Instead, the effect on one’s psyche is permanent.
At age 16 I read Neill’s “The Free Child” and wondered that things could be so different!
I did see it, which is why I remembered. It was a Paisley secondary, tall man with heavy rim glasses. Can’t remember his name! For some reason, I’m thinking his first name was Dan.
That’s a wide assortment of tormentors, Astragael, interesting to read. The master who used cutting sarcasm – one needs to trust and admire such people first, and know that the twinkle in the eye is affection not scorn. But I agree, a verbal sideswipe at the wrong moment in the wrong company can leave an indelible mark.
Ah, AS Neill along with Paolo Friere remain two of the shining beacons within my sense of my profession as an apprentice educator for all these years across multiple countries and cultures unto the Far East where I now reside and do my imperfect best to practice the vocation, still.
Wonderful to read this as well as the other contributors’s reflections and reminiscences.
Thank you Grouse and everyone.
Please can anyone explain the term “attention seeker”?
Surely everyone who writes is an “attention seeker” or why bother writing in the first place.
I’ve always assumed the term to mean attracting attention onto one’s self to the detriment of all else; making a lot of noise, usually at an inappropriate moment.
Ouch
Reprimand accepted.
It’s just that I have seen the term “attention seeker” wrongly attributed too many times.
Now even the phrase causes the old hackles to rise.
That’s a debate for another time and place though.
No, no, wasn’t chiding you. The phrase is one I’ve not heard spoken for many years. I’ve only ever used it for show-offs. And I think it’s superseded by the more familiar ‘narcissist.’
Carol McGrath says:
Hey Grousebeater,
I just discovered your work when I was looking up about A.S.Neill and read an old post about him.
Thank you for what you wrote.
I just had my 70 year day but in my early 20s my sister, sister-in-law and a few other people all pulled their kids out of school and start their own home school, The Co-Op School, first in my sister’s basement, then in someone’s summer house, then in a former jailhouse on a former United States military air base in Newfoundland.
We took the bars off the old jail cells and had a school based on Neill’s work. It was the happiest time of my life. The school ran for a number of years until we all (kids, parents and teachers) grew up and moved on with our lives in the best possible ways. I went to live in England with a small group of musicians and actor friends, and they came with me to visit Summerhill and hear Neill give a talk.
I’ve now been an herbalist for the last 40 years. I live hand to mouth, have no savings and LOVE what I do… teaching herbal medicine and doing consultations to help people become healthy. (I’ve also had a son who’s now 40 plus raised two young relatives for the last 16 years who are Iroquois, the kids of my younger sister’s adopted daughter).
Two years ago a taught a course on Plant Identification and Wild Edibles in my back yard (I’m now in Ontario after living for 30 years on a Nature Sanctuary in British Columbia) for a group of home schooled kids. It was like being back at The Co-Op School again, or like being at Summerhill! The kids had a great time, I had a great time and every week I taught them was like having a fantastic artistic meal and celebration!
After telling the kids one week “Today we’re gonna do something REALLY DANGEROUS! We’re gonna eat Stinging Nettles!” The kids went from stunned shock to amazement and delight as I taught them how to handle Nettles without getting hurt, and steamed up Nettles and served them with a dressing of olive oil, tamari and fresh grated garlic. One little boy had three helpings! Most had at least two helpings.
Neill is still a hero to me. The kids I taught in my 20’s have been successful, smart, excited adults … one is a university professor, one is a teaching photographer who goes across the country on his motorcycle every year or two, one does environmental work, one teaches golf … basically they follow their bliss!
Thank you for the lovely article about Neill, I’m so glad I met him and will never forget that humane beautiful man!