What is your opinion of the Summerhill School? Sir Ken: Summerhill is great. It was founded by a visionary educator called A.S. Neill in the U.K. in the early part of the 20th century. And it’s still going. It’s now run by his granddaughter. It’s a very unusual school by most standards. It’s relatively small compared to most public schools. It’s a school where the divisions between teachers and students have been blurred. There’s no regular, compulsory daily curriculum for the kids. The student go to things that they want to go to for as long as they want to go to them. The decisions about the governance of the school are taken jointly, involving the teachers and students. Disciplinary decisions are taken by meetings of students and teachers. All issues to do with programming and quality are jointly considered. The students, effectively, develop their own programs in consult with the teachers. And if they don’t want to go for a while, then they don’t go. Within that are strict protocols about how decisions are taken and ratified. It’s not anarchy. But it is co-managed, or directed, by the students and the teachers. It’s had a huge influence, actually, on generations of teachers and theorists in education in Europe. It’s right in the heart of what people consider to be progressive education. I’m not too comfortable with the terms “traditional” and “progressive.” I know what these terms are getting at. The difference between schools which are totally organized by teachers and organized by methods and a set curriculum, based on a conventional view of subjects, of assessment, versus those which are more dynamic and more fluid. Summerhill would be at one end of that spectrum — more fluid, dynamic and self-organizing. A lot of people who go to see Summerhill are surprised at the apparent freedom that the students and teachers have given themselves. There’s a lot to learn from Summerhill. It’s one of those schools like Black Mountain in America. Schools like this come around from time to time. They set about a new way of thinking. They give a different sense of what’s possible if they are given the right conditions. They’re based on the principle that students, if they’re given freedom and responsibility, will rise to it. It won’t dissolve into anarchy. It will resolve into something much more productive than people think. The kids have much more moral judgment, much more self-determination, much more responsibility than people would believe, when they’re given the opportunity to exercise them. The things I’m talking about are not, it seems to me, eccentric or new. It’s not whimsy and its not a fad. From the beginning of public education, there have been people looking for alternative ways of doing things, better ways of thinking about organizing our institutions. More responsible ways of engaging children in their own learning. Kids are not widgets. Students are living, breathing people who will only learn if they are engaged properly. We have a responsibility to the development of all the students in the system. It’s important for them, the health of our communities and the strength of our economies. The problem is to get these ideas into the mainstream. As soon as governments get to thinking, “How can we do this for everybody,” they immediately default to an industrial model. They think it must be standardized. What Summerhill and all the great progressive schools have shown us is that the only way you get schools to improve is by personalizing to these children, these parents, this community, this place.
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 06:43:40 +0000