Top 10 for Summerhill Teachers

Ten Things You Need to Know if You Want to Be a Summerhill Teacher

A lot of people want to work at Summerhill School. It is the glamour child of the Democratic Education world. Here is a list of ten things you need to know if you want to be a Summerhill Teacher.

1. Summerhill needs good teachers. That’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? After all it is a school. Unfortunately, the school has suffered with teachers who miss the basic point that to be a teacher means to teach: it does not mean reliving your own childhood or putting on lots of cool activities that you would have liked to have done when you were a kid. Summerhill is the last place for the “teacher as entertainer” that you sometimes see in other schools, filling kids’ lives with activity after activity.
2. Know your subject. If you don’t know what you are teaching, what’s the point of you as a teacher? When you know your subject you will be able to adapt it to the level of the children you are teaching, which leads on to…
3. Know your students. If you don’t get the level right you are going to be either patronising (over simple) or impossible to understand (over-complicated). Spend some time learning what they do and do not know. Summerhill kids are generally confident and mature in ways that children in other schools are not, but achieving this may mean that they have deficits in prior learning. It is a part of your job to work within these constraints, not just wheel out the standard curriculum you learnt at teacher training college.
4. You need some way to check that what you are teaching has actually been learnt. Summerhill doesn’t measure children in the systematic way that is encouraged in the mainstream, but there is no way you can be a good teacher unless you have some way of finding out whether what you have taught has been learnt. Not measuring children does not mean that you have to do away with tests. Many children like tests, funnily enough, because they want to know whether they have really “got it” just as much as you do.
5. Don’t turn teaching into a popularity contest. Don’t give out cakes to people just for turning up, don’t coax them in with playful activities and don’t dumb your material down. Kids at Summerhill are quite often “behind” in formal terms, but they more than make up for that with smarts. Most of them can see through these games. If they can’t it is sad and you are taking advantage of them for your own purposes.
6. Get used to being marginalised. If you are not big enough to accept that sometimes your precious classes will come second place to an impromptu theatre performance, party or hike, Summerhill is really not the place for you. In most children’s lives at Summerhill teachers are a necessary evil, reminding them of the need to “get serious” sometime.
7. Be fair with your time. Sure, it is a great boost to your ego to be able to fill your timetable with classes for the few eager students who are going to get good grades. You have a professional obligation to think of all of the children, however. This means always being prepared to help children back into the classroom, dedicate time and energy to preparing classes at their level and be responsive to their needs. It is a private school: the children who are not going to classes have as much a right to your time as the ones that are always there.
8. Children grow up and mature without you. A lot of neurotic adults profess to know what is good for children and then bully their way into young lives trying to get a little credit for a developmental process that will happen without them. Get used to it. You don’t know better.
9. Summerhill is a family business as well as a school. This means there is a lot of generational wisdom about the “Summerhill way” of doing things. It can be frustrating for a teacher with a lot of professional experience to find that her own way of working does not fit, but it is just common sense that a school with such a unique culture as Summerhill will have ways of defending its uniqueness. You are wasting your time if you think you are going to change the basic philosophy of the school with your own brilliance: if you are that brilliant you should go and start your own school.
10. Take a full part in community life. Work at Summerhill does not end when your classes end. If you are unable to enjoy the benefits of the rich culture of the school because you are too full of your own professional dignity, Summerhill is not for you.

I have written this list for the benefit of anyone thinking of working at Summerhill. It is a personal view that does not represent the school’s views.

Rabelais: Do What You Like

Their lives were governed in their entirety not by laws, statutes or rules, but by their own wishes and free will. They got up whenever they wanted, drank, ate, worked, slept when they felt like it. No one watched over them and no one forced them to drink, eat or do anything at all. This is how the Abbey of Theleme was established by Gargantua. There was only one clause in their rulebook:

DO WHAT YOU WANT TO

because free, well-born, well-educated people, conversing in honest company naturally have an instinct and drive which will always tend towards virtue and away from vice. They call this honour

I am digging up roots and exploring tributaries. A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School continues to offer a vision of a different kind of education: one that allows children to live in freedom, regulate their own lives and find their own passions. Here is François Rabelais in Gargantua describing the Abbey of Theleme, a mixed sex monastery where the only rule is to “do what you want”.

Do what you want to: seems like a good idea doesn’t it?

But you have to do it, not just think about or watch videos about it.
The “what” is sometimes hard to find. You need patience.
It has to be what you want, not what your parents, teachers, best friend or peer group think is for the best.
And you will also want to get in touch with what you want, so that you really want it: not a casual feeling that this might be a way to pass the time.

No.

DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.

And, if you are not doing what you want to do, then stop, change direction and find the way to do it.

He Cannot Rule Children

The master only compels, the father by honesty and gentleness accustoms his son to do well of his own mind rather than by fear of another: and that he should be all one in his presence and behindhis back. He that cannot do this… let him confess that he cannot rule children

Erasmus, The Education of Children

The purpose of this blog is to read into, behind and beyond A.S. Neill the founder of the libertarian school, Summerhill. We often hear arguments for rigour, discipline and control with regard to education. Erasmus, on the contrary, argues that the best way to educate children is to do it yourself with loving kindness. He says that children are naturally free and should be kept that way and that a good teacher does not need to resort to physical chastisement.

It sounds a lot like Neill.

It sounds just and humane.

Maximum Freedom- Daniel R. Bock

Summerhill is not a “do as you please” school. The children are bound in by community rules that they develop themselves. Basic safety rules are still insisted on by the adults, and the business aspect of the school is not within the province of the children’s concerns… In addition, the child still has the choice of which classes to attend or whether he or she will attend any classes at all. The child has maximum freedom with almost the only limits being safety rules or when his or her freedom infringes on the rights of others.

Daniel R. Bock
Professor in Education, Illinois University, Chicago
Article in Educational Leadership, 1978

Bock visited Summerhill after Neill died. He has a low level worry about the state of education in general. This gives me a chuckle looking back on the seventies from 2014: he would be completely horrified to see where education has led now.

It is not just that schools have got worse, but “society” itself seems to have been sucked deeper and deeper into freedom-hating hole. I did a little experiment with that piece and turned it around so that it would reflect my experience as an adult. Try this on for size:

Ours is not a “do as you please” world. We are bound in by laws that we ourselves develop. We still have to follow basic health and safety regulations, and the financial direction of the state is not within the province of our concerns… In addition we have free choice regarding how we use our time, what we do with that time. We have a maximum of freedom with almost the only limits being safety rules or when our freedom infringes on the rights of others.

This not only does not seem problematic: it seems extremely healthy to me. What does seem problematic is that other metaphor for what a school can be: authoritarian, disciplinarian, moralistic, violent and heirarchical. And just as I turned the view of Summerhill back on the world and called it healthy, you can turn that other version of school back on the world and calll it sick.

It is not hard for a repressive school to turn into a nightmare. I have been reading about Dozier this morning and am shocked more than anything by the way the state tried to prevent the investigation and the “community” opposed the reformatory’s closure. There is something in this to meditate on.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/fifty-five-bodies-and-zero-trials-at-the-florida-school-for-boys

Erich Fromm- Man For Himself

Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself. It lies in the fact that we have lost the sense of the significance and uniqueness of the individual, that we have made ourselves into instruments for purposes outside ourselves, that we experience and treat ourselves as commodities, and that our own powers have become alienated from ourselves. We have become things and our neighbours have become things. The result is that we feel powerless and despise ourselves for our impotence. Since we do not trust our own power, we have no faith in man, no faith in ourselves or in what our powers can create.

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, 1947

Fromm was a younger contemporary of Neill who ended up working at Yale. He wrote the introduction to the

True Self-esteem

True self-esteem means not caring whether you get an A in the first place. It means recognising, despite all you’ve been trained to believe, that the grades you get do not define your value as a human being. It means defining for yourself what constitutes success.

William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep

Deresiewicz is arguing against the tendency in the United States educational system to punish children with “education”. Advanced study classes, extra-curricular activities and programmed sports make for a progressive “schoolification” of the world.

Defining for yourself what constitutes success seems like an eminently sensible move for the vast majority of students caught up in a system that is heavily-skewed towards supporting the already rich and powerful elites. The mere fact that people are striving to compete in this system is systemically absurd: not everyone can be a millionaire.

The world tends not to approve of people who decide for themselves that they do not want to participate in collective delusions. Outsiders have a tough time throughout history.

Neill was an outsider. His school struggled along scaracely making enough money to stumble from one decade to the next. And throughout it maintainted that children should not be measured or tested and that grades do not define your value as a human being.

Mr Gumpy at Summerhill- John Burningham

All you need is a good teacher. If you meet a couple of inspired teachers, you’re lucky. I had two: Harry Herring, the art master, and James East, who taught literature and history. I’d always done a lot of drawing. I was always at it on the quiet: lorries, fighters and bombers. Mr Herring really just let me get on with it on large pieces of paper and with lots of paint.

This is John Burningham, one of my favourite children’s book writers. He also happens to have been a student at Summerhill where he was taught by Mr Herring, the long-time art teacher there who really deserves a monograph. If anyone has any information about him, I would love to hear.

The quotation comes from the Independent newspaper.

Charles Olson: the Ideal Summerhill Teacher?

I despair where teaching is put on any other ground… than the individual (what is his or her ground, get to that, citizen, go back there, stand on it, make yrself yr own place, and move from that): these two things, driving it home that there is no secret at all, there are only these two accuracies, these two habits, the habit of yrself and the habit of the practice of yr trade…

And it is crazy that one should ever have to stress these things- you’d think they’d be givens (they surely were at those times when men respected two things, themselves & objects (materials, whatever- others!)

But it is true, it needs to be fought for- even fought out- these times…

This comes from Martin Duberman’s book on Black Mountain College. I have been looking for a common thread of thought and practice, something that will lead me to understand where Neill came from, what cultural factors played into the vision of Summerhill and what made that vision acceptable to people in his time.

It seems to me that what Olson is talking about here is precisely what Neill means when he talks about educating the individual. It also seems to me that is precisely the thing that is lacking in our schools today. I don’t deny that there are good, caring teachers who are working hard and “doing a good job”, but this absolute respect for the student’s ground… where can you see that ?

You can’t get it through attainment targets, technology and performance criteria.

Black Mountain College Again: Josef Albers

What we should carry on, I think, is our belief that behavior and social adjustment are as interesting and important as knowledge.  That besides statements and statistics, we must cultivate expression and metaphor.  That the manual type, as well as eye or ear people, are as valuable as the intellectual type… Life means change.  Our aim is forward”

This comes from Albers’s address to the community of Black Mountain.  He has just returned from Harvard where he worked in a three hundred year old institution with a library of six million books to a tiny community eight years old with only eight thousand books.  This institution would attract the brightest lights of art and literature and cast a light far beyond the mountain valley of North Carolina where it was situated.

Image: http://luislopg.blogspot.com.es/2014/04/josef-albers.html

Was Black Mountain College Summerhillian?

But he (Rice) tried. He tried hard, because he deeply believed, despite his occasional cynicisim to the contrary, that almost every young person could be salvaged. First create a climate of liberty, Rice would say- that is, reomove the usual lists of dos and don’ts- and then “surround the person with one invitation after another,” not only invitations to literature, art, music and the like, but also “to be a good, pleasant, respectable person to have around- and that’s a very nice invitation; it’s not beyond most people.”

Black Mountain, An Exploration in Community
Martin Duberman
Northwestern University Press, 1972