Letter from Matt

.: October 8......
To the Journal for Living:

In April of this year I travelled from Britain to the States to promote my book A Free Range Childhood [a review of which you may read by clicking here, and which you may order by clicking here],

which is an account of my nine years as a houseparent at A.S. Neill's Summerhill School. It was a wonderful trip for me and I have many warm memories of the people I met up with and the enthusiastic conversations we had.

Matt and Ron Miller in Cambridge (MA)
But my warmest memory has to be of my trip to the Free School and the welcome I received from Chris and Betsy Mercogliano and the staff and children of the Free School.

It has been several years since I left Summerhill and I still miss the wonderfully lively and chaotic atmosphere of the school. The well-ordered and anxiety-ridden atmosphere of what we usually call education has never had any appeal for me. So, as I drove with Ron Miller, the publisher of my book, towards Albany, I wondered if the Free School would live up to its name or would it just be a slightly liberal version of the same old dull and uptight system we see everywhere.

As soon as I started up the stairs of the Free School, the wall of shrill children's voices assaulted my ear-drums and I felt a wave of nostalgia pass through me. This sounded just like Summerhill and soon I found myself in a large room, full of children and occasional adults, that felt just like Summerhill. It was chaotic, but there was flow. It was noisy, but it was interactive. It was not being controlled, but it was not out of control. This was the atmosphere that I knew so well from Summerhill and loved: an atmosphere where it is okay to be emotional, where it is possible to say what is really happening for you and to be heard.

I had the chance to meet various staff and kids and to attend a community meeting. I discovered that many aspects of the life of the Free School are different from Summerhill, being as it is a day school in an urban setting, yet the freedom is as real and the kids as responsive to the atmosphere of freedom.

Several times I heard the story of how Mary Leue had asked Neill in the 1960's if he thought that the Summerhill philosophy of freedom and approval could be applied to working-class kids. His reply was "I wouldn't be so daft as to try." Far from being deterred by this, Mary accepted the challenge. Well, old Neill was right about most things, but he was wrong about that. The freedom of the Free School feels every bit as real as the freedom of Surnmerhill.

Of course, Summerhill has several acres of grounds to play in, where children can be building tree-huts in the woods or riding their bicycles around all day. This is a luxury, but it is not essential to freedom. I certainly learned a lot from my visit about how the same principles can be applied in such a different setting. One thing that Neill warned against was other schools trying to copy Summerhill and I think he was right in this. But the Free School has not gone down this route. It has forged its own unique identity.

In the evening I gave a talk at Borders Bookshop, with Chris. Afterwards I was able to sit around and talk with various teachers from the Free School. As we talked and swapped stories it soon became clear that the sort of difficulties and joys of working with free kids in rural England are actually very similar to those of working with kids in urban America. The essential nature of children, when it is allowed to emerge, is pretty much the same anywhere.

As I write this, a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, with both Britain and America flexing their military muscles, ready to lash back, I find myself thinking a lot of Summerhill and the Free School. Our respective community meetings give a forum for people to sort things out before they escalate to levels where violence is the only answer. Kids are fundamentally reasonable, if they are given the opportunity, and are treated reasonably themselves. Politicians and religious leaders could learn a lot about human nature and cooperation from listening to how the children of Summerhill and the Free School conduct their community affairs.

Hate is not inherent to human nature; it is learned. Anyone who has lived with children in freedom knows this. This is not mere theory; it is based on long-term observation and experience. As long as children's emotional lives are seen as secondary to academic, religious and cultural dogmas, then our educational systems will continue to turn out terrorists and war-mongers. What happened at the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was not 'unimaginable,' as the media suggested, but the inevitable outcome of economic and military policies that put people second to power and profit.

As the war-mongers beat their chests and bare their teeth at each other, those of us who know that the best of human nature is already alive and unfolding in our children, will continue to support and nurture these qualities. There will, no doubt, be more carnage as things escalate, but there is also a world being born every day and in every new life that is free of prejudice and hate. The challenge of peace is not to meet the war-mongers in their arena of hatred and violence, but to meet our children with openness to their inherent qualities to live and love fully.

Matthew Appleton
Bristol, United Kingdom
Move to a review of Matt's wonderful book, A Free-Range Childhood
Move to Down-to-Earth bookstore to order