Summerhill school BBC mini-series

Here’s the first part of a television mini-series (four 30-minute episodes) aired on BBC last month that dramatizes the struggle between Summerhill and the government in 1999, when Ofsted inspectors told it basically to conform to certain standards or close. In this case “conforming” meant giving up the democratic ideals that the independent boarding school was founded on — full rights for all its pupils, including the right to choose their own school schedule and even the right to opt for no lessons! If it sounds controversial, well, it is. Still there are educators and ex-students across the globe who vouch for the system, and a whole slew of democratic schools based on the same principles have opened since Summerhill’s founding in 1921.

A review from The Herald about the mini-series that also gives a bit of background about the school and the struggle that’s the centerpoint of the series.

Kudos to The Freechild Project blog for posting a link to the video.

Summerhill was founded by A.S. Neill as an experiment in radical education and treatment of children that’s still going strong today. At Summerhill the kids are given the same freedoms we offer everyday to fellow adults — power over their own lives, the right to voice their own opinions, and the ability to discover who they are and what they love at their own pace. Democratic meetings are held several times weekly, where any issue can be brought up by students or teachers, and where the community works together to decide on rules and punishments. As such, the rules at the school are constantly in flux. The number of students far outnumbers the adults, and with one vote per person, children really are given complete control over their surroundings.

That’s not to say that everything is chaotic! Summerhill teaches freedom, not liberty. So long as a child is doing whatever his or her personal preference is, that’s fine, but whenever their decisions begin to hurt or offend others, everyone gathers together in a meeting to come up with a solution. In a truly democratic fashion, students learn how to balance personal freedom against community. At the same time they learn the positive (and negative!) sides of peer pressure, which societal courtesies can ease tensions, and more.

So what makes it different in essence than homeschooling? Three things, I think:

• Giving all students power over their own lives, and allowing them to define their own schedules and learn and play at their own pace. They’ll have an unprecedented amount of real leadership and decision-making that can’t be given in a homeschooling situation.
• The sense of community that develops at a school with under 100 people. Because kids are involved with the others everyday and know them all, the desires of the majority will have a profound effect on them. At the same time they have the support of a loving and tight-knit community to explore themselves. Both of these pulls from society are something that can only be learned among others, not by learning solely on one’s own.
• The variety and abundance of choices at Summerhill. Students here have many adults in their community to give guidance and teach them. They have several stocked academic classrooms at their disposal, not to mention classes that aren’t offered at your typical state school — among them classes like horseback riding and woodcarving. Children can’t discover everything they like and are good at without a lot of variety.

Can you tell I’m completely taken with the idea?

Others seem to be. The court case portrayed in the mini-series has a more recent happy ending: The Guardian reports that the latest inspection of the school (2007) gives glowing reports, noting that the “pupils’ personal development, including their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, is outstanding” and that they are “well-rounded, confident and mature” when they leave. “The democratic process used to manage the running of the school provides pupils with outstanding opportunities for personal development.” There’s also a growing appreciation for unschooling, and democratic schools, along with other alternative forms of schools, continue to open and thrive around the globe.

I don’t know if this growing grassroots movement is verging on a larger breakthrough and acceptance. But I am intrigued by the nearly 90 years of success that Summerhill boasts, and the hundreds of testimonials and successful lives its students and teachers have left behind. I’ll leave you with a look at Summerhill’s policy statement:

1. To provide choices and opportunities that allows children to develop at their own pace and to follow their own interests. Summerhill does not aim to produce specific types of young people, with specific, assessed skills or knowledge, but aims to provide an environment in which children can define who they are and what they want to be.

2. To allow children to be free from compulsory or imposed assessment, allowing them to develop their own goals and sense of achievement. Children should be free from the pressure to conform to artificial standards of success based on predominant theories of child learning and academic achievement.

3. To allow children to be completely free to play as much as they like. Creative and imaginative play is an essential part of childhood and development. Spontaneous, natural play should not be undermined or redirected by adults into a “learning experience” for children. Play belongs to the child.

4. To allow children to experience the full range of feelings free from the judgement and intervention of an adult. Freedom to make decisions always involves risk and requires the possibility of negative outcomes. Apparently negative consequences such as boredom, stress, anger, disappointment and failure are a necessary part of individual development.

5. To allow children to live in a community that supports them and that they are responsible for; in which they have the freedom to be themselves, and have the power to change community life, through the democratic process. All individuals create their own set of values based on the community within which they live. Summerhill is a community, which takes responsibility for itself. Problems are discussed All members of the community, adults and children, irrespective of age, are equal in terms of this process.

apologies.

I spent the past two summers working as a camp counselor at a local YMCA outdoors-but-day-camp. I should say right now that I am a poor counselor at best. Some people seem born with an innate ability to herd a pack of eight-year-olds tamely from one activity to the next, without any arguments, skinned knees, or whining at all. I am not one of those people.

With no idea on how adults ought to act around kids, I decided to try and treat them the way I had always wished to be treated as a kid. Like I said, I wasn’t too great at it, and often resorted to saying the same sort of things my mother always said to me. But still, I quickly realized that not all the kids wanted changes in how they were treated. They wanted what they were used to, and often would run up against The Norm, these invisible rules and standards that the kids were accustomed to and would get confused and angry anytime I trespassed them.

The Norms cover a whole range of topics. One of the most visible was my appearance itself. I often got asked whether I was a boy or girl, mostly by the little ones, and several times I was privy to enlightening dicussions on why I was sitting / smiling / acting like a boy, which would start out with the kid instructing me to do something in either a “girl way” or a “boy way”, and then getting more and more frustrated and loud as I did it wrong. (Did you know that girls smile with their teeth but boys smile with closed mouths? It’s one of those things I knew when I was five, along with the fact that girls have eyelashes but boys don’t, but then later forgot.) Kids don’t like people who aren’t easily categorizable. I needed to chose a label — Boy or Girl — and since my body and swimsuit obviously betrayed me as Girl, I needed to adopt all the social expectations along with it. Since I didn’t, I was constantly told off by midgits to sit right, grow my hair out, and shave.

One Norm that really bothered me that I unfortunately never did have sufficient time to battle against was the practice of apologizing. When you’re an adult, you say “I’m sorry” for accidents. Whoops, I didn’t mean to bump into you. Oh, I thought I was brushing your hair softly, I didn’t know it would hurt you. Hey, I know I said I’d do this one thing but I forgot. Sorry. When you’re a kid, apparently, you only say “I’m sorry” for things you did purposefully, out of spite. Personally, I always resented being made to apologize for something I wasn’t sorry for, and I tried to remember not to make my kids do that either. Ideally, I thought, they’d just get pre-decided and agreed-upon punishments, like five minutes sitting out from the next activity.

One time I got called out by a girl who was taunted by another, who tearfully scolded, “Aren’t you going to make her apologize?” That caught me off guard. “Are you sorry?” I asked the taunter, who emphatically said she wasn’t, resulting in more tears. Both of them had been getting more and more annoyed by the other’s company throughout the day, and even though I wanted nothing more than to get them apart so they could cool off, and then hopefully talk to the taunter, I still had to waste five minutes convincing the sniffling girl that look, the other was getting punished, so get over it. Another incident left me even more flabbergasted when a boy ran up to me to say that another boy had hit him. The accused boy was right behind him, obviously feeling bad and trying to make sure he was alright. The first one said that he hadn’t done it on purpose (kid, why are you tattling to me then?) but when I asked the second boy to apologize, he looked shocked. “Why?! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I tried to explain that that’s why he ought to apologize, but he didn’t really understand. I think I sent them back to play without pressing my point.

Which got me to thinking: why is it a practice to make kids apologize to each other when they hurt each other? I even know families where that’s the rule, and the kids are so well-trained that they even forgive and forget and start playing again once the other apologizes. (I’ve since learned that it isn’t common in Europe.) More to the point, why did I hate it so much?

For one, I always resented being made to apologize. No one likes being forced to do something, simply because the other person is bigger and stronger. I used to yell at my mom: “Why should I apoogize for hitting my brother? I’m not sorry; I wanted to! He was being mean!” It generally only got me more punishments. But then I realized that apart from among children, where this is apparently acceptable behaviour, being forced to apologize is only something you do to your betters — either someone incredibly wealthy, or someone far up the social ladder. A queen you would apologize to. A white person you would have had to apologize to if you were black and this were 100 years ago. Being humiliated like that and forced to apologize makes you into the servant, into someone not worth as much as the person you’re apologizing to. Not really something I want to be teaching the youth of our nation.

I’m kind of glad I tried to rebel against it as a kid then, even if it didn’t get me anywhere.