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…
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…
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?
Sunday Basics: Risk Risk is an acceptable part of children’s lives at Summerhill School. You cannot give children freedom without risk, and there is nothing quite like the issue of risk to divide opinion about what is best for children. There is a strong, intuitive desire in parents to protect their children, to minimise…
Food at Summerhill School is not only served in the dining room. There is a rich culture of food. Kids develop an interest in food because they have opportunities to prepare and eat food. That doesn’t mean they don’t complain of course. In this post, I look at the culture of food at Summerhill.
Some people find the system of fining people at the Meeting in Summerhill problematic. In this post I describe how a typical meeting case might go and discuss what kind of punishment the fine might really be.
Writing school policies is not easy and for democratic schools it is even more complicated. You cannot just take a policy statement off the shelf and use it without thinking clearly what it implies for the staff and the inspectors who will use it to understand your practice.
This is a short post to fill in as I am sick and am only up to looking at pictures: old Summerhill pictures. They are cool.
