Age Divisions Summerhill is a boarding school. There are two different types of age division in the school: one is academic; the other is related to the boarding accommodation. In this post I want to describe these divisions and discuss whether they have any validity outside Summerhill. There are four academic divisions: Class 1, Class…
Summerhill School is a family business. This is not the way one normally thinks about schools, but Summerhill is far from being a normal school. In this post I want to talk about the family and explain why, in its own unusual way, it works for Summerhill to be in the family. The current Principal…
Beddies Officers Summerhill is a boarding school. In this series of Summerhill Basics articles I have been describing how committees work at the school and today I am going to describe what Beddies Officers do. Beddies Officers are members of a committee. I am not going to describe how the book goes around for Beddies…
“Boring!” What do you do when the kids are bored? Do you change your tack and do something more interesting, something more relevant? Do you pep things up and make it all a bit more exciting? In this post I want to talk about the Summerhill approach to boredom, because it frequently surprises and challenges…
I was talking to a retired biology professor from the United States on the Camino de Santiago. Brian grew up in New Jersey as a scavenger kid hunting muskrats on the mudflats. He’d take them across the bridge into Manhattan and sell the pelts to the Jewish furriers, making money for himself even as…
“You old curmudgeon!” Zoe said. I had proposed unsuccessfully that the party should finish at midnight so that I could get some sleep. My room was in the house and that is where the boom-chacka of the party was loudest. “Hey,” I said, “What kind of democracy would it be if I couldn’t say what…
The idea of the “gangster age” is pure Neill. I haven’t come across the theory anywhere else, but it comes out of Neill’s overtly psychological reading of child development. Today I want to talk about the gangster age in Summerhill Basics because it is such a fundamental part of the school. It seems to me…
What is depressing about the habitat is the regimentation and the lack of choice. This is why children can be happier in a less expensive environment so long as they are not being deprived of all freedom.
Party Time! Today I am going to describe how parties at Summerhill help the democratic community to work. If you are starting a democratic school or democratising an exisiting school, you want to give as much attention to the festive cycle of the year as to the academic cycle. I described before how the “book…
Do you think young people should be involved in cooking and cleaning? Do you think they should be included in all of the activities in a household or a school? Is Summerhill different from other schools just because it is a democratic school and does that imply that children should be more involved with the day-to-day maintenance of the place? How do you prepare young people for adulthood?
