and reach thousands of daily visitors
27 MARCH 2009
NO 1418
Neill
Like thousands of others before me, I found Neill's best books a delight to read. Fresh, humorous, provocative, they were often inspiring in their profound common sense. Yet Neill could also be infuriatingly simple minded or evasive when tackling certain issues. I had constantly to bear in mind the fact that, though he was in many respects a brilliant publicist for his own ideas, he was also a propagandist, intent on convincing an often puzzled or hostile world of the value and practicality of his revolutionary ideas about children. A pioneer is reluctant to give hostages to fortune, and it is easy to forget how thoroughly shocking parts of Neill's philosophy were during the 1920s, when he first began to work with problem children. So it came as no real surprise to find that many of the anecdotes he related, and which made his books so eminently readable, were not always accurate in the detail, though their essence was true enough. Perhaps they should be treated as parables: in setting them down or telling them to his lecture audiences, he was doing what Orwell once observed in Dickens's work, 'telling small lies in order to emphasise what he regards as a big truth'. Over the years he would tell the same story in different ways; often he would retell an anecdote of twenty years' standing as if it had happened the day before; and he was not above manufacturing certain details in order to make a story more startling or complete.
While trying to get to the heart of Neill himself, I gradually realised that, almost without meaning to, I was building up a picture of what it was like to live and work and play at Summerhill. Needless to say, the private reality was quite unlike the public image. The popular idea of the school was of a place where anarchy prevailed, since everything and anything was permitted; or of a model community pervaded by peace and love, a blueprint for Utopia where children were free to be happy and happy to be free. The picture I was being shown was of a much more complex, structured and constantly changing community, in which both adults and children were frequently subject to very much the same kind of hardships, crises, satisfactions, and delights as others living in tightly-knit communities. Nevertheless, there were important differences in attitudes and behaviour, which made Summerhill unique. In trying to get Neill's work as well as his personality into perspective, it seemed important to try to reproduce this picture as faithfully as possible.
There was one matter that I was forced to consider time and again, since it clearly interested so many people. This was the question of whether a school like Summerhill could succeed without the presence of Neill himself. In one sense the question has already been answered: under Ena Neill the school has continued to be run on the same principles ever since Neill died and when she retires Neill's daughter Zoe will take over her position. Of course Summerhill can never be quite the same without Neill. A community that depended so much for its spirit and purpose on the personality and temperament of its creator is bound to alter when he is no longer there. But the question has a wider importance, since it asks whether the particular type of freedom that Neill made possible at Summerhill can be emulated in other communities, run by men and women with different qualities from those which he possessed.
It is perhaps premature even to try to
formulate an answer to the question, since so few people have made any
serious and whole-hearted attempt to put his ideas to the test. Perhaps
this account of his life will make it a little easier to see how Neill
achieved what he did with his remarkable experiment, and why, when he
died, The Times was moved to begin its obituary with the words:
'If children anywhere are happier nowadays in school than their elders
sometimes were, it is due in no small measure to this craggy, lovable
Scot.'
JONATHAN CROALL
Croall, J. (1983). Neill of Summerhill. New York. Pantheon Books. pp. 3-4.
