With our review of the literature about Summerhill, we begin to sense a misunderstanding, or at least a common lack of appreciation, of the true innovations which free schooling entails.

This is the somewhat disappointing entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica on Summerhill:

It is not clear that the members of Summerhill would agree entirely with this summary. Certainly this statement is an example of attempting to fit Summerhill into the expected language and categories of education at more traditional schools. However, to some extent the impression is more accurate than a member of The New School might expect. For example, it is true that courses are offered at Summerhill and that there is some division of the children, for administrative and housing purposes, into age groups. To some extent these elements of Summerhill are traditions inherited from Neill’s background, and to some extent they are concessions and compromises made by the members of Summerhill in ways which might be unlikely to happen at The New School.

For example, age segregation is a common practice at English boarding schools. It is traditional and accepted at Summerhill. However, age segregation is repugnant to the ideas of equality as practiced at The New School. Proposals to make distinctions among members of the School based on age are often rejected on that basis alone. Hence, the theoretical bent of The New School prevents it from accepting a practice which Summerhill regards as a mere practical accommodation or convenience.

Essentially, Summerhill was founded in 1921 in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, Germany. Though not called "Summerhill" at that time, Neill’s school was part of an international school called die Neue Schule.

This is a charming example of historical coincidence. The New School was in operation for two years before this historical detail about Summerhill was discovered. The translation of the name of Neill’s original free school, "die Neue Schule," is of course, the New School. This gives an historical resonance to the connection between The New School and the founding ideas of Summerhill and the free school tradition itself.

There were wonderful facilities in Dresden and a lot of enthusiasm, but Neill became progressively less happy with the school. He felt it was run by idealists - they disapproved of tobacco, foxtrots and cinemas - while he wanted the children to live their own lives. He said:

"I am only just realising the absolute freedom of my scheme of Education. I see that all outside compulsion is wrong, that inner compulsion is the only value. And if Mary or David wants to laze about, lazing about is the one thing necessary for their personalities at the moment. Every moment of a healthy child's life is a working moment. A child has no time to sit down and laze. Lazing is abnormal, it is a recovery, and therefore it is necessary when it exists."

After a few months, Neill, with Frau Neustatter (afterwards his first wife), moved his school to Austria. The setting was idyllic - on top of a mountain - but the local people were hostile.

By 1923 Neill had moved to the town of Lyme Regis in the south of England, to a house called Summerhill. This is the origin of the famous name. The school continued there until 1927, when it moved to the present site at Leiston in the county of Suffolk, England.

Neill continued to run the school - later with the help of his second wife, Ena - until he died in 1973. Ena then ran it until her retirement in 1985 when their daughter Zoe, the current headteacher, took over.

According to the website which it maintains, Summerhill today has not changed fundamentally since it was first started. Its aims are described as:

To allow children freedom to grow emotionally;

To give children power over their own lives;

To give children the time to develop naturally;

To create a happier childhood by removing fear and coercion by adults.

The author of the website goes on to say:

"Summerhill has now been running continuously for seventy-five years. Its success in providing a happy environment for the kids, and in producing happy, well-balanced men and women, stands as a continuing proof of the Neill's notion that `The absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.'"

It is clear from this statement that Summerhill continues Neill’s tradition of emphasizing emotional issues, perhaps to the detriment of academic, political, or other issues. This preference for the emotional aspects of childhood may be a distinctive mark of Summerhill’s character. It is a subtle but significant emphasis. It does not serve to exclude any other influence, but the question of whether it overwhelms certain other interests is intriguing.

Summerhill is undoubtedly a seminal institution in the tradition of free schooling. In fact, it is Neill’s references to freedom in his school which is the most likely origin for the term "free school" as a description of a school where children are intended to be free while attending the school, rather than being temporarily un-free in preparation for later life.

Summerhill itself, however, can be understood in the context of the "progressive education" movement, which emphasizes experiential learning over rote memorization or lecture. Though Summerhill is clearly an innovation which rises above the "progressive education" movement itself, the reasons for its success, in contrast to the purported failure of the progressive movement overall are important to understand.

The best know introduction to Summerhill for most people is a book written by Neill in the late 1950s and published in 1960. The book is, of course, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. In his forward to that book, Erich Fromm, a note worthy post-Freudian psychologist and social critic, offers a context to understand the relationship of Summerhill to progressive education generally. Fromm also points out one of the central concerns about Summerhill which The New School seeks to address.  He writes, "I feel that Neill somewhat underestimates the importance, pleasure, and authenticity of an intellectual in favor of an artistic and emotional grasp of the world."

Summerhill embodies the insight that the needs of children are best judged and met by allowing children to control their own activities. As the Summerhill website puts it:

Summerhill School is unique. It is a progressive, co-educational, residential school, founded by A. S. Neill in 1921; in his own words, it is a `free school'. The freedom Neill was referring to was the personal freedom of the children in his charge. Summerhill is first and foremost a place where children can be free.

There are two features of the school which visitors usually single out as being particularly unusual. The first is that all lessons are optional. A school which compelled its pupils to go to lessons would be, at best, a travesty of freedom.

Many people suppose that no children would ever go to lessons if they were not forced to. How miserable their own school experience must have been, if lessons were so unpleasant as to inculcate this belief! At Summerhill, it is rare for a child to attend no lessons at all - at least, after the initial shock of freedom has worn off. But when it does happen, no pressure is applied to the child to start going to lessons.

The second particularly unusual feature of the school is the weekly Meeting, at which the school Laws are made or changed. These laws are the rules of the school, and the Meeting is attended by all members of the school. Changes to the Laws are made by democratic agreement; pupils and staff alike have exactly one vote each.

These two features are certainly central to the school, but they fail in themselves to capture its essential nature. Needless to say, epithets like `the school where kids do what they like' similarly miss their mark. What they omit to say is that Summerhill is a community. It is a community most of whose 80-odd members are children, so teaching is a part of it; but it is not the most important part. The most important part is building and maintaining an environment where members of the community can co-exist in harmony and in freedom. (Emphasis added.)

Summerhill serves the purpose of what might be called "inner freedom." This is thought to be the psychological state which results from the non-coercive environment of the school and freedom from fear of authority. Though Summerhill embraces and affords other forms of freedom, its tradition and practice lend themselves primarily to this internal psychological experience of freedom.

Summerhill accomplishes this by modifying certain elements of a traditional English boarding school. Essentially it takes the ideas of student-self-government and the primacy of emotional development, inspired by the Little Commonwealth, and interjects them into the lives of students at a boarding school. The result is a combination of traditional and student-participatory elements. The mix of these elements is not theoretically designed, but is the result of long experience and intuitive balancing of the various components to optimize "inner freedom" for the students at the school while meeting certain other requirements from outside the school.

Neill’s school arose from the organic mix of the traditions and habits of an English boarding school and the innovation of student-governance. Neill’s school was not theoretically pure. As headmaster, he did not surrender all of his authority to the democratic bodies of the school. The power to hire and fire faculty and staff was retained in the sole discretion of Neill. He continued to own both the school as an institution and the campus on which the school operated. Hence, though the students were in effective control of most aspects of their day to day lives, this was largely at the discretion of the headmaster. This mixed system, operating with an eye to the practical operation of the institution and community of Summerhill, continues essentially unchanged under the present headmaster, Neill’s daughter, Zoe Readhead.

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