Concept

Summerhill School

Overview

Summerhill School is an independent (i.e. fee-charging) day and boarding school in Leiston, Suffolk, England. It was founded in 1921 by Alexander Sutherland Neill with the belief that the school should be made to fit the child, rather than the other way around. It is run as a democratic community and is considered a democratic school; the running of the school is conducted in the school meetings, which anyone, staff or pupil, may attend, and at which everyone has an equal vote. These meetings serve as both a legislative and judicial body. Members of the community are free to do as they please, so long as their actions do not cause any harm to others, according to Neill's principle "Freedom, not Licence." This extends to the freedom for pupils to choose which lessons, if any, they attend. It is an example of both democratic education and alternative education.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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It has destroyed the idea that learning is properly a monopoly of the few who are predestined by nature to govern social affairs. But the revolution is still incomplete. The idea still prevails that a truly cultural or liberal education cannot have anything in common, directly at least, with industrial affairs, and that the education which is fit for the masses must be a useful or practical education in a sense…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
States what Summerhill School is.
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It is desirable not merely that the child should learn not to interfere with others as they execute their own ends, but also that he should learn to work with them in an intelligent way. Hence the scope of the material should not be limited to training the discriminations and comparisons of a single sense (however valuable this may be with very young children who are incapable of coöperative activity…
John Dewey, Schools of to-morrow
Close in meaning to Summerhill School; the term itself is not named.
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The power of education in forming character and opinion is very great and very generally recognized. The genuine beliefs, though not usually the professed precepts, of parents and teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by most children; and even if they depart from these beliefs in later life, something of them remains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in a time of stress or crisis. Education is, as a rule, the…
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
Close in meaning to Summerhill School; the term itself is not named.
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Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Anarchism.

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