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Write me at maryskole@aol.com  Summerhill For and For

by Mary M. Leue

from SKOLE, the Journal of Alternative Education,

Summer, 1996

 

 

Ed "the ed" of A Voice for Children called me recently, and, among other things, we discussed my writing an article on Summmerhill, which I've visited twice in the past few years. I agreed, but only after we had talked out my doubts. "I'm not ready to rubber-stamp Summerhill," I told him. " I love the school and the people, but I am not willing to surrender my own perspective to write that kind of article. What I've read in your newsletter and the Trust Journal are mainly parochial in origin, which is fine, but I can't do that." "I won't publish a 'Summerhill For and Against'" article," Ed told me. "Of course not," I answered. "Summerhill has had far too many ambivalent supporter-detractors in the press at large! That would be an obscenity! The same thing happened to Reich too, and I won't do it! That's why I'm in a quandary."

 

As we continued to explore the subject, it gradually became clearer to me that there is a lot of leeway between writing my heart feelings and still not rubber-stamping Summerhill, which I hadn't been willing to do! In fact, not wanting to do that is in itself a real compliment to Neill. I have saved several postcards from him with brief but cogent responses to letters I had sent him in 1968-9, during our Sabbatical year in England. I had written him expressing my wish to start a school (which I actually did on returning home). His advice to me was to remind me that imitating his school was a very bad idea! And when I had asked him if he had ever thought of doing a school in which working class kids were students (which was my hope), his pithy rejoinder was, "I'd think myself daft to try."

 

So Zoë Readhead (Neill's daughter and the present Head of Summerhill) would not be likely to find many points of external similarity between The Free School in Albany and her Summerhill. We are small (35-45 kids), inner city, non-residential, pre- and elementary school in age range but without a middle or high school group, of mixed racial and socio-economic origin. We do school in an old (late-19th century vintage) Italian language parochial school building of somewhat grim appearance outside and terminally grubby (although not at all grim!) inside - and the children's play yard is small.

 

In terms of how the two schools "work," there are differences as well. Kids are asked to participate in noon meal cleanup, which is apparently a "no no" at Summerhill. We hire a cook (who is also a teacher), but do the rest ourselves. Our council meetings are never scheduled but are always ad hoc, called in response to an immediate problem which the people involved (kids and adults) have failed to resolve by lesser means. Administrative decision-making is conducted by weekly meetings of staff to which kids could come, but don't unless for a special reason, and don't seem to find relevant to their sense of autonomy. It would seem to us excessively theoretical to expect them to want to on a regular basis. On the other hand, more and more graduates are returning to become members of the teaching staff for a few years before launching out into the "world," so the non-involvement of younger students doesn't seem to create a lasting lack of desire or capacity to participate in school affairs of administration.

 

One of the things Ed mentioned over the phone to me was how signally rare it is for schools that call themselves alternative to function in a mutually respectful (self- and other), peer-level atmosphere. He's right, and understands how important it is to understand the difference between the indirect, "iron fist in velvet glove" power position a lot of adults employ and real equality. As Neill put it, "Freedom, not license." That concept is very tricky, because a heck of a lot of people confuse catering to kids, patronizing, flattering or manipulating them, babying them or neglecting to demand accountability from them, with being "real" with them. Kids know intuitively how much leeway they have with adults, and behave accordingly! In this respect Summerhill is beyond reproach - and there are darned few adults connected with schools who value true respect toward and inclusion of kids within the power structure, regardless of their ideology, in spite of lip service that says they do!

 

The adult contingent at Sudbury Valley School is one of the very few schools still extant in the US of which I know that practices what it preaches. I include us in that category, but it may even be that it is not possible for a person (like me) who works inside the school to judge this phenomenon objectively. I know that our staff members have felt critical of the "disciplinary" methods used by a number of other alternative schools which, on the other hand, include students fully in their administrative functions! In this sense, Summerhill's assigning of fines or other penalties by vote at the meeting to "wrong-doers" is something we would not often do. It would strike us as an indication of a failure of the council meeting system we employ for problem-solving to have to resort to fines or other tokens of admonishment. Much more often, problems are resolved by reconciliation between warring parties through patient sorting out of bad feelings and injuries on both sides, supported or corrected by witnesses to the event, until everyone involved has a clear sense of the underlying pain that has contributed to the unjust behavior.

 

But this difference too may reflect, at least partially, the age at which many of our kids start school with us. We have a pre-school, almost full-time day care, group which feeds into the "K-9" (ungraded) group on the lower floor of our building. Little kids upstairs get to be with the big, downstairs kids from the word go, and look forward to the day when they can join them in "real school." Dayle Bethel accurately decries the politically correct advocacy by public school supporters of "essential social skills from peer learning" as about as sensible as the "peer learning" of Lord of the Flies. But in our case - as in Summerhill and Sudbury Valley - it is real, and is important. What they learn from us and from the other two schools may differ, and probably does, but it's important in each case! As it is in all alternative schools.

 

But this fact does make the "system" devised by the involved participants within each school to handle dissent, conflict, violation of the rights of the individual, a significant issue. On this matter, I don't think head count democracy is enough. In logical terms, it is perhaps "necessary, but not sufficient." I suspect there is a very real sense in which genuine democracy defined by "town meeting" methods (as a kid I entertained myself watching the operation of town meetings from the balcony of the town hall in our small New England town) may involve injustice toward individuals, if a decision made by the majority is based on majority disapproval or dislike of the person, perhaps for very good reasons, but still, unfair in the purely humanistic sense of the word. And when applied to kids, potentially even more so, unless the school population is pretty exclusive, pretty homogeneous.

 

George von Hilsheimer's school(s) - Summerlane, Buck Brook Farm, Green Valley School - all allegedly modeled after Summerhill - struck me as being of this kind, judging by the stories I heard and read about them over the years of their sequential existences. Toward the end, when they finally moved to Florida, I remember reading of an incident in which the kids voted to bury a kid up to his head! Human nature&emdash;at least, the nature of pre-pubescent kids&emdash;is very malleable. That's real "Lord of the Flies" stuff, and I sometimes speculate that it might have reflected George's own secret, kid-like glee when his school kids (who were state-assigned "JDs," from whom the school derived its income at the time) acted out his own hidden sadism - or perhaps (to be less cynical) either his love affair with ideology (like the Nazi doctors who had no doubts about their own morality when they conducted their "experiments" with officially designated non-people) or his own growing sense of disenchantment with the school process.

Summerhill reflects the sweet affection of Neill - and now of Zöe - for kids. Sudbury Valley reflects the sweetness of its adult founders/administrators.

 

Jerry Mintz's Shaker Mountain in Vermont and Herb Snitzer's Lewis-Wadhams in upstate New York were equally benevolent. Yet each school has (had) its own unique flavor. All but Jerry's school catered exclusively to middle class kids. Jerry's was more like ours in Albany, a mixed group (see his account of the school's origins in Challenging the Giant, the Best of SKOLE, vol. I, pp. 1-13). I take these similarities and differences as reflections of the qualitative similarities/differences between George, Zoë, Mimsy-Dan-Hanna, Jerry and Herb! Interestingly enough, Jerry's own council meeting system, although very similar to Summerhill's, had a more flexible voting pattern in which decisions that had been taken could be recast if seriously objected to by any person as unfair! Shaker Mountain's students came from widely divergent backgrounds, as do ours, and this sort of built-in flexibility prevented some purely majority decisions that might have been infair to unpopular individuals.

 

Interestingly, it is my belief that Em Pariser's Community School in Camden, Maine, which functions as a therapeutic rehabilitation center for high school dropouts, although it does not describe itself as "democratic" per se, operates very much on the basis of genuine respect for each student, and mandates equal respect for staff. I'm still not sure which function is "baby" and which is "bath water," but I do know that it is a person-centered school function, not an exclusively policy-centered one, regardless of the self-definitions offered by an individual school.

 

In actuality, because problems which come out of dysfunctional patterns tend to arise repeatedly in the school community, and because members of the community grow to view each other as members of a family, injustice seldom becomes a factor in a self-styled democratic school. It is very clear, reading Neill's comments on being a teacher, that his model was one of kindness, self-respect and blazing honesty, both with himself and with his students. The "end product" of Summerhill is, thus, not, in my opinion, so much a result of any particular pattern of governance per se as it is of Neill's own character in action! I would hope we can say the same for ourselves, both staff and kids. Time will tell. So far (finishing up our 26th year), we have a pretty good record among graduates. Lots of them, including a number we never would have predicted would do so, come back to share with us their glowing sense of success in their lives!

 

I've not heard the analysis of what makes a school a good one put this way by other people who've written about Summerhill, and maybe it's just too obvious to comment on- but I want to anyway, being a devotee of Reich. Perhaps it's an American characteristic to try to plug in a formula, whether for raising a child or for running a school! Neill makes it very clear that he greatly admired Homer Lane and saw himself as carrying on Lane's way of working with kids. Having a deep sense of inner connectedness with a person- whether that person be Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, Wilhelm Reich, A.S. Neill or George Dennison - is not what I am referring to as only tangentially relevant. To me, loving, admiring, learning from, being inspired by, even agreeing with the person is quite different from imitating a formula that worked for that person as a general "how-to" for running a school. Thus, it's not admiring Sylvia Ashton-Warner or John Dewey that bothers me, but the impulse to replicate their "techniques" that I find disturbing. The "Progressive Education" schools of the twenties and thirties that allegedly patterned themselves after Dewey's principles only worked for a very select population. By and large, so do the Montessori and Waldorf schools of today. It strikes me that, indirectly, our American adulatory tendencies stem at least as much from class and race prejudice as anything, and that they are based on denial, among other things, as Jonathan Kozol said of the small rural "free schools" of the sixties and seventies.

 

Don't get me wrong! It has never occurred to me to accuse Neill of latent prejudice against working class kids! That's not what I heard him saying when he wrote me that he would have thought himself "daft to try." He was looking at his own strengths and desires, not something theoretical or ideological. That's an American characteristic. I have a feeling that our culture fosters ideological patterns, and that these patterns may lead to the kind of adulative imitation I'm referring to, perhaps more than happens in at least some other cultures. From the behaviorist John Watson in the twenties to Gesell and Spock in the forties and Berry Brazleton in the seventies and eighties, we Americans seem to need a framework for understanding child development or childhood learning that comes from someone we can put on a pedestal as knowing something we don't&emdash;and that person can be almost anyone except our parents! As a people we seem almost totally cut off from our parents, from the continuity of generational patterns of doing things, from our many ethnic heritages! Lacking roots, we tend to revere "how-to" books on everything from giving birth to raising kids. to choosing the right way to educate them, to making a marriage work, to "the American Way of Death" à la Jessica Mitford!

 

Lately we've had a rash of non-governmental schools popping up everywhere based on somebody's ideas about learning, whether Montessori, Steiner, Reggio Emilia (whoever she is!), John Dewey, even Dan Greenberg, who sells a kit! - of government-sponsored ones based on the varied formulas mandated by state departments of education and collectively designated as "charter" and "magnet" schools - of various denominational groups' ideas of what constitutes Christian education - and Lord only knows what else! Any one of them may be, perhaps indeed is!, a wonderful place for children, but my belief is that what makes the difference between a school that is good for kids and one that isn't - and this will include any of the above models - has to do with people, the people who set the tone and administer the rules, the families who send their kids there, and the kids themselves! If the kit or the formula helps, hey, do it! We gotta start somewhere! I had a lot of half-baked ideas when I started ours based on various people's beliefs. Fortunately, I - we - were independent enough to be in a position to pick, choose, modify, discard, invent, elaborate our very own way quite soon in the game. Like democracy, freedom is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a school to have! Freedom to be sufficient must translate into people!

 

With that belief as an ending, it only remains to say, long live Summerhill, the most non-ideological, people-based place for kids I know - a place where people of all ages can just be themselves and be loved and accepted as OK so long as they don't invade anyone else's space or fail to respect their on-going investment in their own lives. What else does one need? As Bears Kaufman puts it, "To love is to be happy with." In the realest sense of the word - unsentimentally - Summerhillians, like Free Schoolers, are happy people.

 

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Write me at maryskole@aol.com