I am very sorry for posting this message in "trisquel users", but, please,
read book "Summerhill - A Radical Approach To Child Rearing", which is
already translated at least to 16 languages (English, Spanish, Italian,
Russian, Serbian, Polish, Hindi, Marathi):
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4485614
Just a few quotes:
"Summerhill began as an experimental school. It is no longer such; it is now
a demonstration school; for it demonstrates that freedom works. When my first
wife and I began the school, we had one main idea: to make the school fit the
child--instead of making the child fit the school."
"Logically, Summerhill is a place in which people who have the innate ability
and wish to be scholars will be scholars; while those who are only fit to
sweep the streets will sweep the streets. But we have not produced a street
cleaner so far. Nor do I write this snobbishly, for I would rather see a
school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar."
"I find that the parent who worries most about Billy’s learning to read and
write is one who feels a failure in life because of lack of educational
attainment. It is the self-disapproving parent who believes in strict
discipline. The jovial man-about-town with a stock of obscene stories will
sternly reprove his son for talking about excrement. The untruthful mother
will spank her child for lying. I have seen a man, with pipe in mouth,
whipping his son for smoking. I have heard a man say as he hit his son of
twelve, “I’ll teach you to swear, you little bastard.” When I
remonstrated, he said glibly, “It’s different when I curse. He’s just a
kid.” "
"The children have classes usually according to their age, but sometimes
according to their interests. We have no new methods of teaching, because we
do not consider that teaching in itself matters very much. Whether a school
has or has not a special method for teaching long division is of no
significance, for long division is of no importance except to those who want
to learn it. And the child who wants to learn long division will learn it no
matter how it is taught. Children who come to Summerhill as kindergartens
attend lessons from the beginning of their stay; but pupils from other
schools vow that they will never attend any beastly lessons again at any
time. They play and cycle and get in people’s way, but they fight shy of
lessons. This sometimes goes on for months. The recovery time is
proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. Our record case was
a girl from a convent. She loafed for three years. The average period of
recovery from lesson aversion is three months."
"Most of the schoolwork that adolescents do is simply a waste of time, of
energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play and play and play; it
puts old heads on young shoulders.When I lecture to students at teacher
training colleges and universities, I am often shocked at the ungrownupness
of these lads and lasses stuffed with useless knowledge. They know a lot;
they shine in dialectics; they can quote the classics but in their outlook on
life many of them are infants. For they have been taught to know, but have
not been allowed to feel. These students are friendly, pleasant eager, but
something is lacking-- the emotional factor, the power to subordinate
thinking to feeling. I talk to these of a world they have missed and go on
missing. Their textbooks do not deal with human character, or with love, or
with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming
only at standards of book learning -goes on separating the head from the
heart."
"The molded, conditioned, disciplined, repressed child--the unfree child,
whose name is Legion, lives in every corner of the world. He lives in our
town just across the street. He sits at a dull desk in a dull school and
later, he sits at a duller desk in an office or on a factory bench. He is
docile, prone to obey authority, fearful of criticism, and almost fanatical
in his desire to be normal, conventional, and correct. He accepts what he has
been taught almost without question; and he hands down all his complexes and
fears and frustrations to his children. Psychologists have contended that
most of the psychic damage to a child is done in the first five years of
life. It is possibly nearer the truth to say that in the first five months,
or in the first five weeks or perhaps, even in the first five minutes, damage
can be done to a child that will last a lifetime. Unfreedom begins with
birth. Nay, it begins long before birth. If a repressed woman with a rigid
body bears a child, who can say what effect the maternal rigidity has on the
newborn baby! It may be no exaggeration to say that all children in our
civilization are born in a life-disapproving atmosphere. The time table
feeding advocates are basically anti-pleasure. They want the child to be
disciplined in feeding because non-timetable feeding suggestsorgastic
pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalization;
the deep motive is to mold the child into a disciplined creature who will put
duty before pleasure."
