Swearing: Fornication! Excrement! Micturation!

Swear words are vulgar words because they belong to the language of the common people. A professor says anus, but a navvy says arse. Maybe we should teach our kids to swear politely and shout out Fornication! Excrement! Micturation!

Inside Summerhill there is a relaxed view of swearing. I was talking to a teacher at another democratic school and asked what they would do if a child sweared. He said he would get down to the child’s level and say, “The way you have chosen to express yourself is hurtful to me.”

This not only seems phoney to me, but moralistic. It misses the basic point about Summerhill, which is the equality of adults and children. Adults do not have to pretend in a hypocritical way to be “better” than they actually are in order to instil some false idea of culture, behaviour or social decorum in the children. They can blow away the hypocrisy.

It is perhaps the most challenging part of Summerhill for many adults that the school must make you drop your assumption of superiority as an adult. No, it says, we are all living together. What you want is no more valid than what I want. We are equal.

You can see from the example that Neill gives that vulgar words are vulgar precisely because they belong to the common people. He says the role of school is not to create a superior class.

What do you think the aim of a school should be?

http://www.summerhilldemocratics.net

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.

Steiner: Off With the Fairies

Whatever may be my ideas of a good and useful person, this child is to become one through having his best talents brought out, and these I must first discover. What matter the rules by which I myself feel bound? The child himself must feel the need to do what he does.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925),
Manifestations of Karma, 11 Lectures Hamburg, 16-28 May, 1910
(Steiner Press: London, 1995), p.11

My experience of Steiner education is the play group I once took my oldest daughter to in Bristol. That was a long time ago and I only went once. The parents were earnestly middle class, wore heavy-knit jumpers and were a little too interested in their children for my liking. I preferred the playgroup down the road in a cavernous church hall where there was a healthy racial mix and the parents sat around talking to one another while the children played by themselves.

I say this up front because it is possible that contemporary Steiner education has little to do with the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner schools have been prominent and controversial in gaining access to the funding available through the Free School programme put forward by Michael Gove. The Foundation has clearly got enough money to stump up the considerable sums that are required to start new schools and has enough clout to put through its educational plans.

The idea of encouraging the child to “feel the need” seems pretty humane, doesn’t it? I can go along with that. It almost seems to chime with Neill’s more rational ideas of leaving the kid to itself. However, there is a whole other dimension to Steiner that leaves you with your mouth open once you have read Manifestations of Karma, the book from which this quotation is taken. Steiner believes that you should leave children along completely up to the age of seven because they are in their “physical body”. At seven the “etheric body” descends upon them and they are able to undertake active learning. Only when the “astral body” has descended will they be ready for academic study.

You cannot deny that Steiner was an eccentric genius with oodles of charisma. Neill called him a very bright laddie and was rather forgiving of him personally, although he obviously had little patience with his followers. One of them said to him after a lecture, “I didn’t agree with anything you said tonight. You educate for this life, while we educate for the lives to come.” For that kind of dogma you might as well go to a Catholic school and get some qualifications to go with your supersitition.

I may be a nasty old sceptic but I don’t think I would have bought this load of hogwash even if he had the most lovely twinkly eyes though. It goes from zany to nuts and back again as he talks about the separation of the moon from the earth and the conjunction of celestial forces at work upon us. Entertaining, yes. The basis for a coherent programme of education: most definitely not.

This makes it all the more extraordinary that Steiner education is such a big player in alternative education. The only explanation is that parents are attracted to the idea of a less punitive education for their children and are prepared to swallow a few fairy tales to achieve that end. Does anybody really believe any of this? I could as easily believe that there are schools that base their curriculum on reruns of Star Trek.

What astonishes me is that Steiner has got away with this baloney and Neill, who talks a lot of common sense, is sidelined and forgotten. I really cannot explain it. Why do people who want to an alternative vision of education get seduced by the fairies? Why can’t we look at education together as reasonable human beings and come up with a humane education system?

This is saddening. The urge to protect and educate your children humanely is about as natural as you can get. I say that even though I don’t even like the word natural, which is used and abused so much in the educational world. You do not have to sign up as a card-carrying looney in order to want a more natural education for your child. You do not even have to be middle class and wear those woolly jumpers and sandals.

Humane education is for everyone. I am almost tempted to believe that the government encourages Steiner to give people who have a genuine alternative to punitive testing, dumb subservience to bureaucracy and hopelessness in the face of global capitalism a bad name. But that would be absurd. They are not smart enough for that.

So here is a plan. If you are interested in a common sense democratic education, why not get in touch? Let’s all get together and use the power of our communal voice and resources to start a school that actually makes some kind of emotional sense for our children. We can make it as modern as we please because democratic education has absolutely nothing to do with the fairies!

News From Utopia: William Morris and A.S. Neill

“You let your children run wild and didn’t teach them anything; and in short, you have so far refined your education that now you have none.”

Successful businessman, artist and writer: it’s no wonder he never found time to trim his beard.

In News From Nowhere the narrator goes forward in time to a world in which social injustice has been overcome, imperialism, commercialism and industrialism have given way to small communities of interdependent workers living in a non-heirarchical society of equals. Written at the end of the nineteenth-century by the father figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement, William Morris, it allows us to appreciate the intellectual tradition that fed into Neill’s creation, Summerhill.

In Morris’s Utopian future children learn from the adults around them. School is represented as an archaic institution that is no longer necessary:

“‘the struggle for life’ as man used to phrase it (i.e. the struggle for a slave’s rations on one side and for a booming share of the slave-holder’s privilege on the other) pinched education into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information. something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and which had been chewed and digested over and over again by people who didn’t care about it in order to serve it out to other people who didn’t care about it.”

This is Hammond, the writer’s guide in the future, looking back from the perfect future on the idiocies of the past. It is a pretty fair description of our education systems today, isn’t it? “A niggardly dole of not very accurate information” in a transaction between two apathetic parties seems to be a pretty fair description of many schools I have been in.

In Morris’s future children learn from the adults around them. They spend a lot of time in the countryside, camping and walking in nature. They pick up crafts, such as thatching, for example, because they are interested in the work that goes on around them. They learn to read by the age of four without needing to go to school. They learn languages because they have to communicate with other people and, since in this imaginary future linguistic chauvinism has vanished, those languages include Welsh and Irish as well as French and German.

Modern day anarchist communities are about as close as we come to Morris’s ideal

Morris built his own house and designed and made all the furniture in it. The practice of his life was anti-industrial. He valued the hand-crafted object above the mass-produced replica. He also acknowledged that there was a price tag on this and that it was worth paying. He would recognise modern day hippy parents who shop for organic vegetables, make their own clothes, recognise the ethical problems of mass production and search out Fair Trade produce whenever they can as his spiritual heirs. Although Morris ran a highly-successful design business in London, he did not set himself apart as the “artist/genius”, but wanted a kind of art that was rooted in craft and accessible to the common man. It is the aesthetics and economics of the local. It tends towards the handmade. It is the reverse of Ikea.

Neill was also a strong proponent of practical activity for children: learning in the world, not learning about the world. The workshop was, and continues to be, the heart of Summerhill life. The role of teachers on the other hand was always more problematic. Of course students wanted to learn conventional subjects in order to get on with their lives after Summerhill, but one gets the sensation that in a better world this awful requirement would be lifted. This is the world that News From Nowhere describes:

William Morris made some beautiful designs. It is ironic, given his lefty leanings, that they are now sold on biscuit tins to middle class matrons in the Victoria and Albert Museum shop.

“The whole theory of this so-called education was that it was necessary to shove a little information into a child, even if it were by means of torture, and accompanied by twaddle which it was well known was of no use, or else he would lack information lifelong: the hurry of poverty forbade anything else. All that is past; we are no longer hurried, and the information lies ready to each one’s hand when his own inclinations impel him to seek it. In this as is in other matters we have become wealthy: we can afford to give ourselves time to grow.”

It is tempting to read Utopian writers and check off the things that they “got right”. There is no question that Morris’s ideas of small interconnected communities of self-sufficient individuals sharing their wealth and knowledge has not come to pass. His vision of a diminished London in which the razing of the slums allows the country to enter the city is charming, provocative and seductive, and he would no doubt be horrified by the “triumphs” of modern technology: more roads, airports, commerce and high rise buildings. We can’t say that he was wrong just yet as environmental catastrophe might still lead us his way, but it is clear that Progress does not lead in one direction only.

The ills that he imagines a wiser future eradicating have deep roots and freely propagate themselves: poverty, injustice, stultifying education, state-sponsored ugliness, war, intolerance. We are still the victims of the idea that if you do not “shove a little information into a child” it will be lost forever. It is a frighteningly pessimistic view of human growth and development, isn’t it? Are we still pressured by the “hurry of poverty”?

On the other hand we could say that now more than ever “information lies ready to each one’s hand when his own inclinations impel him to seek it.” This should make a difference to the way we educate our children, but it doesn’t. I think the problem is school. School as an organisational mechanism is something that Hammond jokes about:

“‘School?’ he said; ‘yes, what do you mean by that word? I don’t see how it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting and in the former sense we might talk of a school of children- but otherwise,’ said he, laughing, ‘I must own myself beaten.'”

The problem with school is something that Neill deals with systematically in his project for Summerhill. It

William Morris was inspired by an imagined sense of what medieval craftsmen might have lived.

evolves over the years and is always in touch with the spirit of the times, but the root of it seems to be here. School as an institution perpetuates systemic authoritarianism. It takes away the creative life-force of children and replaces it with something that is not worth having. It sets up a series of gateways to knowledge with gatekeepers who earn their salary by giving access to that knowledge. We accept this story even in a society where information increasingly does lie ready to each one’s hand.

Let’s imagine a school where this is not the case. Would you imagine a Summerhill?