A S Neill was the educational Lysenko of his day

 

 

 

 

 

A S Neill was the educational Lysenko of his day. His schooling system was an absolute disaster. The vast majority of children left to decide their own educational pace will fail miserably to make significant progress. OFSTED failed Summerhill when it eventually got inspected– it was being run by his daughter after his death– itself evidence of its lack of credible management. Probably the only really well known achiever that came out of Summerhill was John Burningham, the children’s book illustrator.

Just read these accounts– and bear in mind they’re a selection published in the Guardian, which was always going to put the best possible gloss it could on the Summerhill experience, and ask yourself whether you really want your children’s education to have the same character and outcomes as these.

One of my little hobbies is collecting accounts by people who were subjected as children in the 60s and later to various forms of libertarian or closed separatist sectarian upbringing and education. The experiences they describe are never less than horrifying. The best of them is “My Life in Orange” by Tim Guest, a brilliant telling of his experience of being the child of a woman who gave herself and him up to the Bhagwhan Shri Rajnesh. It wasn’t just Jimmy Savile who spent years subjecting children to appalling abuse in plain view and got away with it.

Very sadly, Guest died suddenly of a drug overdose a year or two ago.

Another wonderful account is “When Skateboards will be Free”, an account of a US SWP upbringing by the son of a mother who obviously had issues beyond those that went with giving her life to the SWP cause.

A less sensational, but no less deeply sad book is “Children of the Revolution: Communist Childhood in Cold War Britain”, a collection of accounts of the lives of the children of British Communist Party families–the periods covered range from the 20s and 30s to the 70s and 80s. Many of the tellers (especially Michael Rosen and Jackie Kay) regard their “progressive” CP upbringing positively. But to any reader not already sold on the need to justify the existence of the CP and the life choices of their parents, their lives as children were painfully diminished by being subjected to the imperatives of Stalin’s, Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s CP.

 

Comments

[Farenheit211]

Cracking post.

Spot on with the assessment. Those of us who have been through a child-centered, learn at your own pace, type of education have been really let by 'educationalists' of the Left.

[Imshin]

Interesting post, thank you.

I remember our much loved scout leader Meidad told us about this school in a scout meet when I was about fourteen. I wasn't greatly impressed even though I hated school (Meidad was later killed in the army when his jeep went over a landmine in 1982, but had planned a career in education). It was the first I'd heard of democratic schools.

Since then they've pretty much taken off in Israel, maybe because private education is very much restricted here, unless you are ultra-religious, and democratic schools are one of the few alternative options for secular kids.

There are different schools with different levels apparently. there's one by Hadera that's meant to be good. The one in Jaffa is pretty awful, I hear. My daughters know kids who go there or went there and say pretty much all the kids start smoking (both nicotene and drugs) very young and do very little school work. The son of friends of ours went there for a year and hated it. He had to cram all summer to get back into an ordinary school because he'd fallen back so much. It's actually heartening to hear that kids like him have the good sense to know when they are wasting their time.

I have a good friend who teaches in a democratic school in Kfar Saba which is meant to be far better. Both his kids went there and were very happy. I think their mother thinks they didn't do enough work there.

Seems to me that these schools are less likely to produce adults who understand that one must often work hard in life and make compromises in order to feed ones family. Mind you, I know people who went through the ordinary education system and never understood that either.