For eight-five years, England’s Summerhill community has shown children learn more when they are in charge of their own educations.
A few days ago I dropped off my thirteen-year-old daughter Eva for a new term at Summerhill—the English school famed for its emphasis on students’ personal freedom. I was in Eva’s room helping her unpack when a couple of girls rushed in to announce that a particularly annoying boy was on his way. She quickly locked the door and got on with unpacking. Moments later there was knocking, and a boy’s voice calling her name. She rolled her eyes and ignored it. After a few seconds of banging loudly he shouted, “Bitch!” and threatened to find an axe with which to smash the door, before stomping off. Completely unperturbed, Eva continued her unpacking.
Later as we left the room a spray of water hit me straight in the face and I found myself looking at three girls, who were dissolving into a mixture of giggles and apologies. They had been waiting to ambush Eva or one of the other girls in the room, and did not expect a parent to emerge. Eva found it just as funny as they did.
The atmosphere at Summerhill is more like that of a large family than a school, a family in which adults are included as equals. Some adults might find it uncomfortable to be treated as one of the crowd rather than a figure of authority. Indeed, some parents might find it disconcerting to find a strange boy calling their daughter a bitch and threatening to destroy her bedroom door with an axe. But I felt very relaxed at Summerhill, since it had been my home for nine years, when I lived and worked at the school as a house parent. The easygoing flow of interactions between kids of all ages and adults was familiar. It did not occur to me for a moment that the boy yelling at the door was a pre-adolescent version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The boy was just venting his frustration that Eva had shut him out. The moment passed and later the two of them were behaving toward each other as if nothing had happened.
Summerhill is a boarding school, but it bears little resemblance to the traditional notion of English boarding schools you get from novels. No one wears a uniform. The children swear freely without fear of being told off. Adolescent couples wander about with their arms around each other. Small children weave through groups of adults, totally involved in their own play, with no one telling them to stop running or keep their voices down. Through the years, however, Summerhill has often been a focus of media attention, with journalists who visit for a couple of hours portraying it as the “do-as-you-like school” where unruly children run wild.
