Saturday Summerhill Take Away # 4: Teaching at Summerhill
Teaching at Summerhill is no big secret. It should be the most natural thing in the world. But here is a list of ten ideas that can help to keep you on track as a Summerhill teacher.
Design A School 1-1: Reasons Why
In Design a School Week 1 we are going to Blog and Podcast about our reasons and motivations for doing this project Jason: Raspberries I guess my reasons for getting into democratic education are mostly negative. That means I don’t want to pass on my own experience of school. It certainly turned…
Journey
Leonard’s experiences starting school in Canadia in the fifties
Thursday Thoughts: Boarding
“The English have boarding schools because they do not love their children,” says José. “That just won’t work here.” I can’t really argue with him because there is a profound cultural chasm between us. I don’t find the closeness of his Mediterranean family heart-warming; I find it suffocating. Summerhill is a boarding school of another…
Give Me a Massage: Touch at Summerhill School
Touch is problematic in most schools. Summerhill is different. Sometimes it seems like a troop of monkeys, but there are safeguards to ensure that touch does not become something it shouldn’t. In this post I ask if something can be learnt from the way things are done at Summerhill.
What Can You See in the Big, Big Picture?
What is the Big Question in education. In this post I look at the way our lives are changing and will continue to change. If we think education can follow the same tired old model we are fooling ourselves.
Thursday Thoughts: Play
Play is the sap and essence of childhood. And if there is one dark evil in this messed up modern world we have invented, it is the way we have taken free play away from children. We allow the evil octopus of school work to dominate more and more of their lives. We give them…
Saturday Summerhill Take Away: A Business
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…
Thursday Thoughts: Ombudsmen or Prefects
Ombudsman or Prefect. “An ombudsman? So that’s a bit like a prefect then, isn’t it?” says John who has been to a posh public school. “Sure, they are elected at Summerhill but it’s basically the same idea. You take the older and more responsible kids and give them some authority so that they can do…
Schools With No Trees
The school I can see from the window of Carmen’s apartment in Avilés has no trees. There used to be a row of them around the playground but they were taken down. If you look at the image you can see where they were: that concrete strip in the front. I can’t think why they…
