This is an extract from the autobiography of the legendary scottish educator
A.S.Neill. I strongly recommend his book '
Summerhill school' and his autobiography '
Neill Neill Orange Peel' to anyone who plans to get anywhere near 'educating' a child (hir own or that of others)!
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A note on the title
Years ago, Hetney, a little boy at Summerhill, went round muttering to himself: “Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!” The phrase caught on and has lived for more than twenty-five years. To this day, small children follow me around chanting the words, and my usual reaction is: “Wrong again. Not orange peel—banana peel.
I have selected this rhyme as the title of my autobiography, because it sums up my life with children; indeed, it might be the motto for Summerhill, if we believed in mottoes. These words tell the whole story of my school and my life. They show how the gulf between generations can be bridged—or rather abolished—for they do not connote cheek or hate: they mean love; they mean equality. If every kid in the world could call his teacher Orange Peel, or an equivalent, my mail would not be filled with letters beginning: “I hate my school; can I come to Summerhill?”
Parent or teacher - You cannot boss the child!
The little boy’s chant shows that there is no necessity for a gulf separating pupils from teachers, a gulf made by adults, not children. Teachers want to be little gods protected by dignity. They fear that if they act human, their authority will vanish and their classrooms will become bedlams. They fear to abolish fear. Innumerable children are afraid of their teachers. It is discipline that creates the fear. Ask any soldier if he fears his sergeant major; I never met one who didn’t.
The Summerhill rhyme tells the world that a school can abolish fear of teachers and, deeper down, fear of life. And it is not only Neill that the kids treat with equality and fun and love; the whole staff are treated as pals and playmates. They do not stand on their dignity, nor do they expect any deference because they are adults. Socially, the only privilege the teachers have is their freedom from bedtime laws. Their food is that of the school community. They are addressed by their first names and seldom are given nicknames; and if they are, these are tokens of friendliness and equality. For thirty years, George Corkhill, our science master, was George or Corks or Corkie. Every pupil loved him.
Years ago, in one of my books, I wrote that when interviewing a prospective teacher, my test was: “What would you do if a child called you a bloody fool?” It is my test today, except that bloody—never a real swearword outside British realms—has been changed to a more popular expletive. More and more, I have come to believe that the greatest reform required in our schools is the abolition of that chasm between young and old which perpetuates paternalism. Such dictatorial authority gives a child an inferiority that persists throughout life; as an adult, he merely exchanges the authority of the teacher for that of the boss.
An army may be a necessity, but no one, barring a dull conservative, would argue that military life is a model for living. Yet our schools are army regiments or worse. Soldiers at least move around a lot, but a child sits on his bottom most of the time at an age when the whole human instinct is to move. In this book, I explain why the powers that be try to devitalize children as they do, but the mass of teachers do not understand what lies behind their discipline and “character molding,” and most do not want to know. The disciplinary way is the easy one. attention! stand at ease! These are the orders of the barrack square and the classroom. Obey! Obey! they say, but people do not obey equals; they obey superiors. Obedience implies fear, and that should be the last emotion encouraged in a school. In the U.S.A., it is the student’s fear of bad grades— idiotic grades that mean nothing of importance—or fear of not passing exams; in some countries—Britain among them, I hate to admit—it is still fear of the cane or the belt, or the fear of being scorned or mocked by stupid teachers.
The tragedy is that fear also exists on the teacher’s side— fear of being thought human, fear of being found out by the uncanny intuition of children. I know this. Ten years of teaching in state schools left me with no illusions about teachers. In my time, I, too, was dignified, aloof, and a disciplinarian. I taught in a system that depended on the tawse, as we called the belt in Scotland. My father used it and I followed suit, without ever thinking about the rights and wrongs of it— until the day when I myself, as a headmaster, belted a boy for insolence. A new, sudden thought came to me. What am I doing? This boy is small, and I am big. Why am I hitting someone not my own size? I put my tawse in the fire and never hit a child again. The boy’s insolence had brought me down to his level; it offended my dignity, my status as the ultimate authority. He had addressed me as if I were his equal, an unpardonable affront. But today, sixty years later, thousands of teachers are still where I was then. That sounds arrogant, but it is simply the raw truth that teachers largely refuse to be people of flesh and blood.
Only yesterday, a young teacher told me that his headmaster had threatened him with dismissal because a boy had addressed him as Bob. “What will happen to discipline if you allow such familiarity?” he asked. “What would happen to a private who addressed his colonel as Jim?” I believe that in the Russian Army after the Revolution there were no barriers between officers and men. They were all pals. But the system failed, I am told, and the army returned to its old ways of class division and stem discipline.
Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! is a title that may shock the “dead” teachers. But it will be understood by students in all lands—barring those in Iron Curtain countries who are never allowed to hear of Summerhill. Why do I get hundreds of letters from children? Not because of my beautiful eyes—nay, but because the idea of Summerhill touches their depths, their longing for freedom, their hatred of authority in home and school, their wish to be in contact with their elders. Summerhill has no generation gap. If it had, half of my proposals in our general meetings would not be outvoted. If it had, a girl of twelve could not tell a teacher that his lessons are dull. I hasten to add that a teacher can tell a kid that he is being a damned nuisance. Freedom must look both ways.
I do not want to be remembered as a great educator, for I am not. If I am to be remembered at all, I hope it will be because I tried to break down the gulf between young and old, tried to abolish fear in schools, tried to persuade teachers to be honest with themselves and drop the protective amour they have worn for generations as a separation from their pupils. I want to be remembered as an ordinary guy who believed that hate never cured anything, that being on the side of the child—Horner Lane’s phrase—is the only way to produce happy schooling and a happy life later on. As I am “Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!” to my little pupils, so I would like to be to all the children in the world — one who trusts children, who believes in original goodness and warmth, who sees in authority only power and, too often, hate.
Soon I must shuffle off this mortal coil, but I hope that coming generations will look back at the education of our time and marvel at its barbarity, its destruction of human potentialities, its insane concern about formal learning. I hope, against everything that makes me pessimistic: the wars, the religious suppression, the crimes. Cannot those who yell for the hanging of criminals see that they are treating a ruptured appendix with aspirin? Will not society recognize that it is our repressive system, plus the poverty of our mean streets, plus our soulless, acquisitive society, that is making criminals and neurotics?
I confess to dithering. One day, when I think of the challenge of the young, I am optimistic; next day, when I scan the newspapers and read of rape and murder and wars and racialism, I become engulfed by pessimism. But I guess that ambivalence is common to us all.
