This page is an edited transcript of a talk given by Roland Anderson at the Think Twice Conference in Cambridge, on 23 March 2002.
First, a couple of words of introduction. I studied modern languages at this college. Straight after that I went to Summerhill school, which I'm going to be talking about, where I taught for three years. After that I was a piano salesman; then I was a piano, cello, and singing teacher. Then after that I was a freelance musician in London, and now I'm an accountant.
The talks we've had today so far, which have been excellent and I've really enjoyed them, have focused on particular problems and issues, and suggested particular things that we can do to help solve them. But what I'm going to talk about is more of a long-term solution, or long-term ideas that can maybe help to bring about a world in which this kind of problem, this sort of issue, don't arise quite as often. I'm going to tell a positive story, and I'm going to start with the chap who founded Summerhill School, who was a man called Alexander Sutherland Neill; and to dispel a few myths about the kind of person he was and the kind of place that it was.
A lot of people think that Summerhill was founded by a bunch of long-haired hippies in the 1960s; and while it was frequented by long-haired hippies in the 1960s, it wasn't founded by any people like that. It was founded in 1921 by Neill, who was a dour old Scottish schoolmaster. He was born in 1883, so was nearly forty at the time, and had spent a career variously working in publishing, and also as a dominie, which is the old Scottish word for schoolmaster, in various areas around Forfar.
Neill wasn't very happy with the way that education was being run in the world at large, and particularly in Scotland, during the First World War, which is when he was teaching. So in 1921 he moved to Austria, and annexed to the Eurhythmics School run by Jaques-Dalcroze a little school, with only five pupils, which he called his International School. It moved from there to a place called the Sonntagsberg in Austria, and from there it moved in the mid-1920s to a house in Lyme Regis called Summerhill. At that time, as I say, he only had five pupils, and the idea was that if any issues came up that needed to be discussed, they would just talk about them. There was to be no artificial barrier or distinction between Neill himself, his wife as she then was, who was known as Mrs Linns — her real name was Lilian Neustadter — and these five kids: they would just come and sit around the table and talk about things they needed to talk about. They didn't particularly have to go to lessons; Neill would arrange things when he needed to, and that's how it all began.
When they moved to Lyme Regis, he advertised for "difficult" children and started writing lots of books. One was called "The Problem Child", and he later wrote books called "The Problem Parent" and "The Problem School" and things like that, and used the money from them to help to run the school.
Eventually the school became too big for the building in Lyme Regis — it's since been demolished — and they moved to a little town in Suffolk called Leiston, and that's where the school is now. It's in a big old Victorian house, which was originally built to house the Garrett family, who ran the steelworks in Leiston. Unfortunately they went bankrupt as a result of the Russian Revolution and the house was put on the market. Eventually Neill, with the help of a few friends, bought it, a fourteen-bedroom house with seventeen acres of land, for the princely sum of £3,250.
Now I just want to talk a little bit about the evolution of Summerhill. In the 1930s there were lots of children there. There were all kinds of different ideas going around; there was Jaques-Dalcroze and his Eurhythmics, and Montessori's ideas were very popular, and so were the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. People were looking for new ways and new ideas, and so the school became very popular. Through the 1930s it became even more so, particularly when it was evacuated from Leiston in the 1940s to Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales, where there were over ninety children, which is the largest the school's ever been. That may have been more because the children were safe there from being bombed than because the parents believed particularly strongly in Neill's ideas about education, which I'll come to later.
They returned to the school in 1945; Neill remarked that the Army had done more damage to the school in five years than the kids had done in twenty. Towards the 1950s the number of pupils started to drop off, until Neill's book "Summerhill" was published in the United States, and then suddenly an enormous amount of American children came in and the School was Saved. In 1973 Neill died, and he was replaced as head by his fearsome wife Ena; one hesitantly says things like that about people, but once you'd met her you realised it was true. And now it's run by his daughter Zoe.
Today Summerhill has about seventy children, most of them boarders aged between seven and seventeen. A long time ago, the view of the school used to be that children should be taken away from the grasp of their parents as soon as possible, so you used to have little boarders at the age of five. That's not really very sensible, and the way that people have thought about it has changed, so the youngest children who stay at the school are now seven or eight years old, but we do have day children who are much younger than that. I remember little Diana, a tiny little girl who was from Korea. She had two elder siblings there, and she stayed with her mother in a house over the road, and she used to come to me, this tiny little girl — she didn't know much English — and she use to say "Ah Roland, you fucking bastard, I hate you, ha ha ha ha ha!" because that was the only English she knew. But she said it with such a lovely smile on her face that you could forgive her anything. Actually perhaps that little story gives you an insight into the atmosphere of the school.
I want to talk about a few things about the school that people find interesting. And here are the things that I think are the most talked about things about the school, and I'm going to give them in decreasing order of interest to the general public, but I think in increasing order of importance. The most interesting thing people find is that the children call the teachers by their first names. Shocking! The next thing is that children and teachers appear to swear like troopers. The next thing is there is mixed nude bathing. The next thing is that lessons are optional. And finally, the school is run as a democracy.
Now as I say, that the first few things there are the kinds of things that tend to get picked up in newspapers and articles about the school: "Ha, a school where children can call the staff by their first names, and they can swear, and they can bathe in the nude (oh and by the way it's a democracy)". But I think that the democracy of the school is the most important aspect of it, and that's what I'm going to concentrate on. So I'll talk about the democracy of the school as I experienced it in the three years when I worked there, from 1994 to 1997.
There were two school meetings which took place every week: a General Meeting and a Tribunal. They usually meet in the lounge of the house. And the constitution of the school, insofar as there is a constitution, says simply this: that if there is a meeting of the entire school, that is all the staff and all the pupils, then a majority decision of that meeting is the decision that's going to be made. And the remit of the meeting is very wide. For example, the General Meeting decides things like bedtimes; how long the half-term holiday's going to be — the school terms are fixed but the half-term holiday isn't, so it votes on the charmingly named notion of "slobbing days", which is how many days for half-term you don't have to get up in the morning; and it votes on any issues of general interest to the community. In particular, at the General Meeting the laws of the community are changed. For example there was a law that there's a standard fine of a certain amount of money, 50p when I was there, if you rode somebody else's bike without asking them. There were laws about the beddies officers, who put everyone to bed and get them up in the morning. Being a beddies officer is a really horrible job, I know cause I did it for a term, but you get to go to the front of all queues on the day that you're a beddies officer, which I think was an excellent law, at least I thought so when I was a beddies officer. And general issues like that are all dealt with at the General Meeting.
The Tribunal, which is the other regular meeting, used to take place on Fridays when I was there. It deals with what happens when people break the laws, or when they do something like harass or upset somebody, or anything that needs a decision of that kind. So, for example, the general meeting might decide that there's a standard fine of 50p for riding someone's bike, but it's at the tribunal that you have to bring somebody up and say, "I'm bringing up so and so for riding my bike and I propose he gets the standard fine of 50p", and then there's a vote on that proposal.
The General Meeting and Tribunal are the regular meetings. But you can call a Special Meeting as well, which can be called any time of the day or night if the chairman agrees — it's always called a chairman, even though it can be a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, I don't know why. A Special Meeting is called if there's an issue of particular importance that needs to be dealt with immediately. They're not very frequent, but when they do happen they're pretty important.
Various other things arise from the meetings. For example, when I was there we had ombudsmen. And ombudsman is somebody appointed by the community to deal with cases that involve people who don't feel confident enough to speak up for themselves: perhaps for very small children, or people who may not speak English as their first language and have difficulty expressing themselves in English very well, or people who for some other reason may find it difficult to bring things up in the meeting. An ombudsman can bring things up for them, and they also sort out little cases between children which don't really need to come to a meeting — just little things like "stop harassing me and go away".
I just want to say something about issues that the democracy of the school doesn't apply to. It doesn't apply to hiring and firing of staff, or to taking on or getting rid of children, although there are similar schools where it does. And it doesn't apply if there's a fire or you're at the swimming pool. Those are legal things obviously, but it would be daft to give children responsibility over things like that. So it's a matter of being sensible.
By now, hopefully, you should be getting an impression of a school where the staff and the children, in terms of the meeting, are almost indistinguishable. Often people come to visit the school and say, "We don't know who the staff are and who the older children are, there doesn't seem to be any difference"; and really there isn't. And I think that's a very important issue, this equality of rights between staff and children — obviously not equality of responsibility, and that's where slightly differential treatment comes in — but it's important to realise that this is a school that functions as a community.
Now I want to give you a few examples of a some cases that came up when I was at the school. Once I was brought up at Tribunal, because I was late to my lessons. What would happen is I would sit in the staff room reading The Guardian during the morning break, which was only twenty minutes long, and I didn't want to finish reading the paper — I was a bit lazy — so I used to roll up to my lesson two or three minutes late. And the children in the lesson were really cross at this, so they brought me up at Tribunal. And the proposal that was carried in the end was that I got a strong warning not to, so I didn't do that any more.
A rather more important case, and this is a case where there was a big special meeting, was the case of the Japanese bullying. Now this was a really important case in the school. A little bit of background: the school at various times has been popular in various parts of the world. For example in the 1960s it was very popular in the United States so we had a lot of American children coming to the school; in the 1970s it was very popular in Scandinavia so we had lots of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish children, and in the 1980s it was increasingly popular in Germany. Well, in the 1990s, when I was teaching there, it was very popular in Japan. The Japanese education system was quite regimented and some Japanese parents were disappointed with it, and sent their children to be educated in Britain at Summerhill instead. And that meant that we had quite a large contingent of Japanese children.
Now the Japanese kids, particularly when they first arrived, tended to be quite inward looking, tended to stick to each other, and also tended not to express their emotions or their feelings very easily. This might have been just because those are the children we happened to have, or it might be something about Japanese culture as a whole, I don't know. But it meant that with this particular group of children, if there were problems or issues between those children it was very difficult for them to come out into open, and that was very difficult because things coming out into the open is one of the things that Summerhill really thrives on. A lot of people, kids and staff, had suspicions that things were going on that weren't so good, but in the end there wasn't anything we could do about it. Finally it was an ombudsman — one of the older children — who managed to discover what was going on. And in fact one of the older boys and one of the older girls were actually bullying, really rather nastily, some of the younger kids who lived upstairs in the main house building. And because of the way it was done, it was very secretive — bullying is often like this — it was a really difficult case to solve.
Well the community as a whole takes bullying very, very seriously. There's a list called the bullies' list, and if you are put on the bullies' list, in other words if you're thought to be a bully by the community as a whole, and this is a decision that's not taken lightly at all, then lots of privileges are removed from you: you're not allowed to go out of the school, not allowed to speak in the meeting, there are certain other things you're not allowed to do, and you can also be banned from going to certain areas.
The community realised that there was this serious case going on and they knew how miserable children are when they're being bullied, it's horrible — I know, it's happened to me. And so there was a special meeting which was convened at eleven o'clock in the morning, and which went on till three o'clock that afternoon, which is as long as it took to get all that stuff out. When the school realised that this was going on, they said — and none of this was the staff doing all this, it was all the kids — "we have got to sort this out", and they did. And in fact, in the case of the boy, about the most severe punishment that can be meted out by the meeting was meted out: he was sent away for a week. It's a measure of how strongly the children at Summerhill feel about their school, and what a bond they feel with it, how seriously that that decision was taken; it's not taken lightly at all.
So at one end was the Japanese bullying case, which was a really serious case, and at the other was the daft case of me not coming to my lessons. In the middle was a really good case, an example of a case about the general running of the community, and this also involved me. Basically there was a big problem: people were taking crockery and cutlery out of the kitchen and they were leaving it in their rooms and they weren't bringing it back, so the supply of bowls and dishes and knives and forks got lower and lower and lower as the term went on. And we thought, "we can't cope with this", so the general meeting proposed two things. It proposed a crockery and cutlery amnesty, which was extremely successful, so that was very good — lots of washing up though. And it also proposed that there was a cutlery officer, and in fact I was elected to do that. And every week, just before the General Meeting, I had to go to the kitchen and count all the knives and forks and spoons, and then give a report to the meeting about how many we had. And oddly enough, it worked. We had about a hundred of each when we started. When I first did cutlery the report it was down to about forty or fifty. We had the amnesty, got some more in, and the supply stayed constant throughout the term after that, which was very good, so people were really taking notice.
So those are a few examples of ways in which Summerhill's democracy worked. It's important to realise how strongly children feel about it: even the ones that break the rules and are brought up again and again, and are generally annoying, feel very strongly attached to the democracy of the school. You can't get away with doing things that are against the wishes of the meeting.
Now I want to say a few things about how the democracy fits into the school, how people feel about it, and the effects that it has. First of all, I believe that if a school is to be democratic school then that automatically implies that all lessons must be optional. There are other schools — for example there's St Christopher's School in Letchworth, and Bedale's school used to be similar — where there's a kind of "hands off" approach to learning; you can do this, or you can do that, or you can do the other, but in the end children still have to go. And I think that if children are being compelled to go to lessons of any sort, then you can't call it a democratic school. So the optional lessons come out of that. Also, incidentally, calling teachers by their first names obviously does. Nobody ever called me Mr Anderson while I was at Summerhill; I wouldn't have known who they were talking to if they had.
As I said, the democracy is very strongly supported by the children, and the staff as well. And it's also an extremely effective part of the community. Of course we had problems with children who weren't very happy, children who behaved antisocially, children who used to steal things, all sorts of things, but coming into a community like that really helps you to develop. For example, there was a boy who came to the school who'd had an absolutely terrible time in his early childhood. He came to Summerhill, he was violent, he was disruptive, he was scary, and he was there for four years before I joined the school. So when I arrived, I'd heard about how he'd been such a terror before, but he was charming: the school had really helped him to come to terms with all these problems inside him, and he'd come out as being this really charming person. He did still get into trouble, and after he left the school he got into trouble with the police, but it's my firm belief that he would now be in prison if it hadn't been for that school.
Also, I'll take the example of another boy who came to the school, who was one of those terrible teenage boys who are all arms and legs and had this long hair — long hair's not bad in itself but on him it looked really rubbish — and he just looked miserable and didn't quite know what was going on, and was generally un-rooted, if you know what I mean. He came to the school and for the first term or so he was quite quiet. Then the next term the first thing he did was he got his hair cut, which really helped him. I think he kept his hair long because he had lovely long curly hair and his mum liked it, and it was a really good expression of independence for him to do that. And I came back to visit the school several years later, after I'd left, when he was just about to leave, and he was one of the strongest members of the community. He was always volunteering for things, doing things, being a really strong older member of the community. And again I think this is something that Summerhill's done for him.
Sometimes it doesn't work. There was one child who was really listless, and I think he was a child who really enjoyed having a more structured, imposed input from the outside. So he left the school, and when he came back a year later, just to visit, he looked much better. So there are cases where it doesn't work, but most of the time it does.
Now let me talk about a couple of problems that the school's had. The first problem for me conceptually is that the school depends on private money. There's no way that a school like this is going to be funded by the state, and it never has been. So it has to charge fees, which is not something that Neill, the founder of the school, ever really wanted to do, and I think that's a shame, but there it is. They charge very low fees, which is why the staff are so badly paid, so that as many people as possible can come. In the case of one of the people I talked about before, his local authority actually paid for him to come to the school, but that's unusual; it's very difficult to get local authorities to pay for that sort of thing. Though it's not much more expensive than educating people in a state school, especially considering that it's a boarding school.
The school's main problem has been OFSTED, frankly. OFSTED don't like Summerhill very much, and in the eleven-year period from 1990 to 2000 they inspected it every year, which is very disruptive. Things eventually came to a head last year when OFSTED said the children should be engaged in some sort of educational activity throughout the day. Zoe said "that means compulsory lessons", which it does, and OFSTED said "no, of course it doesn't don't be silly", but she said "yes it does, I'm going to take you to an independent schools' tribunal"; and we went there and we won, and OFSTED won't be back until 2004, and at that stage they have to take into account the schools' philosophy. That was a big victory for the school, because it can now say that it's providing an education under the terms of the Education Act.
Now what I want to do, as I mentioned at the beginning, is to talk about how the school presents possible solutions to some of the problems that we've heard about so far today. I feel that a lot of those problems, for example in our attitude towards Iraq, our attitude towards homeless people, our attitude towards the press, are based on emotions or characteristics which are positively nurtured by the education system that is mostly in place in this country today. And those things are fear, hatred, and ignorance. I think all of those things are deliberately fostered by the education system we have today. It's impossible to imagine an education system better designed to foster those three things.
Homeless people — we're afraid of homeless people. We're afraid of people who maybe haven't had a wash for a couple of days, maybe haven't had a shave for a while, whose hair is maybe a bit knotted up, who wear clothes which we consider to be unusual — we're afraid of those people. And because we're afraid of them we learn to hate them. And if we learn to hate them that means that we're not going to try and find out about them. In other words our fear and our hatred and our ignorance, all of those things that we learn at school, all of those things are directed towards people that we find different, or that we don't like. And this I think is the basis for a lot of our attitudes towards homeless people. Hannah, I don't know if you feel that?
Hannah: Well that's why I'm not sending my child to school.
Absolutely, quite right. And let's take Iraq as well. What is it about Iraq that makes people — our governments, people like Bush, people like Blair, a lot of the people we meet on the street today — what is it that makes them and us feel this hatred towards people in Iraq, so that we put sanctions on them so they have to live in the conditions that Matt described to us? Where have we learnt this? Where have we learnt to be so fearful, to be so hateful, and to be so ignorant? A lot of the things that Matt said I hadn't heard before, and I only know them now because he's come here and told me about them. I didn't go out and find out about them — I take responsibility for that. And I think that a lot of the problems that we have can be attributed to this fear, to this hatred, to this ignorance that we build up. And I want to look at the way that Summerhill tries to combat those problems.
One of the first things that Neill said was: fear is something that should be eliminated from everybody's childhood. Children should not be afraid, and yet they are. Who are they afraid of? Well they may be afraid of other children around them, they may be afraid of adults around them, they may be afraid of an anonymous society around them, but I think that one of the most important reasons that they are afraid is that they're afraid of failing. And I think that the education system that we have now is designed to make children fearful of failing. It's really easy to fail in our education system: if you're dyslexic, if you've got emotional problems, if your parents are fighting at home, if your mother's dead, if your cat's been run over by a car — all those things can make you fail.
What's the point of trying to teach somebody about physics or chemistry or mathematics if their parents are fighting at home every day? It seems to me to be crazy. That child is being set up to fail, and then all the adults around them, their teachers, very often their parents, people who write newspaper articles, will stand there and say: you have failed. And I think that's one of the worst things you can say to a child.
Out of fear comes hatred. That child isn't going to say, "I'm sorry, I'll work harder"; they're going to say, "I hate you, you've just made me miserable". And then are we surprised when we see hateful faces all around us? Are we surprised when we see, for example, an article recently in the Daily Mail of all things — I don't know why I was reading that but I was — about these terrible children of eleven or twelve who are terrorising communities, daubing graffiti everywhere, burgling places. And you look at them, and what do you see? You see children who are frightened, and Summerhill is a school where children are not frightened. Why are they not frightened? It's because they live in a community where they don't need to be afraid of adults, they don't need to be afraid of failing.
Not that we don't use tests and exams in a positive way, if we need to. I used to do it just because my GCSE children wanted to know how they were doing. But in our education system as it stands if you fail, you're a failure. You learn to fear, you learn to hate, and one thing you don't do is get rid of any ignorance. We keep hearing statistics that so many millions of people in this country have literacy problems. Some of them can't read at all; some of them have difficulty reading, they may be able to read a little bit but they don't feel confident about it; some may be able to read perfectly well but they don't want to, they feel really ill at ease reading — things like that. These people come from various backgrounds. Some of them come from wealthy backgrounds, many come from poor backgrounds, some may have divorced parents, some may have parents who are together, some may have only one alive parent, some may not know where their parents are, some of them may be black, white, Indian, everyone. One thing that nearly all of them have in common is they went to school. And yet they can't read.
At Summerhill you don't have to learn to read, and I don't know of anybody who left the school who didn't know how to read. I think that it's a place which can tell us a lot of things about how children, when they're freed from this fear of failure, and this fear of displeasing adults, can bloom into being much more interesting and successful people. I wouldn't consider anyone I know at Summerhill to be capable of supporting any of the policies which we've heard about today, which cause so much misery in the world.
Do you not think that some of this is because of the size of the group? At Summerhill you've got a small group; at some level, altruism and all these democratic principles unfortunately break down.
Yes, that's a really important point. Democracy this way works only on a small scale and it has to be participatory, not representative. Representative democracy has been tried at Summerhill, a kind of council, but it didn't work and they dropped it after about a term.
I think that applying it to larger models is hard. You can't, for example, govern a comprehensive school with fifteen hundred children in that way. But there are things you can do. You can split it down into smaller units and give all of those units a degree of self-government. That actually happened in a school in Leicestershire, called Countesthorpe, and it worked very well. Although there was obviously some element of compulsion as far as lessons were concerned, because it was that sort of school, the idea of self-government for the smaller units was successful. Obviously once the local authority found out about it they put paid to it. There's a book by David Gribbin which describes the experiments there. But the important thing is: to apply a democracy of that kind — yes you're right, it needs to be small scale, but also it must have real power. That's why school councils are so bad, because everybody knows that the staff can override any of the decisions they make.
I was wondering about the Japanese bullies that you mentioned, and what happened afterwards. After he'd been sent away and come back, did they get over it?
It's a long process. I remember him very well: he was a very intelligent chap. He invented the concept of shops at the school. He used to go to the supermarket and buy sweets in bulk, and come back and sell them at a premium to the small children. This incidentally, led to a whole set of laws being passed to govern shops and credit payments, which was very interesting. Small children for example, weren't allowed to owe more than 50p to any one trader, and they weren't allowed to owe away more than half of their pocket money in any week. I think these are extremely sensible credit arrangements that could be adopted very easily in the world at large, and our credit cards wouldn't be so bad. So he developed that, he was very intelligent. I have to say that he did improve gradually as he went through the school, but it was a difficult and long process for him. The other person, who was a girl, improved much more quickly, but he gradually got better. It's difficult to say, "Aha, I had this amazing epiphany moment and suddenly I was a much better person," but certainly I feel, from seing him and talking to him, that he was much happier at the school than he would have been elsewhere.
There are some decisions that I guess are quite difficult to take collectively. When it comes to individual rights — what you believe, what you think, where you spend your money — should that be discussed in a council and everybody take decisions, or are there limits, where individuals have rights and you can't deprive them even if everybody else agrees?
Yes, that's a difficult one. But an issue like that hasn't really ever arisen, or if it has it's very clear where the responsibility of the meeting lies, and where people's individual rights lie.
There's a kind of fundamental statement of philosophy of the school, which is that basically you can do anything you want, so long as you do not endanger yourself, and you don't interfere with other people's freedom. Neill's term for this was, "freedom, not licence". You can't impinge on other people's freedom, and really, it's at that interface where the meeting works.
Take a typical case: people borrowing people's bikes without asking. Clearly that's licence, not freedom, so the fine's very obvious. In other cases it's less clear. For example, there were two kids who were friends of each other. They both had very strange backgrounds, and they generally tended to cause lots of trouble, and they used to bring each other up endlessly in the meeting for calling each other names. One of them was Swiss, and so the other one used to call him "Frog" all the time because he thought he was French — it was all ridiculous — and I can't remember what he used to call the other one, some equally idiotic name. Anyway, there would be piles of cases like this in the Tribunal, and in the end the community just got tired of this and said, "Look, sort it out. We're not going to bother with this any more. Ask an ombudsman, don't take this to the meeting." And I think it was passed that if they wanted to bring up any cases, they had to ask an ombudsman first, and no one would bring them up for them. So that's a case where in fact they weren't really interfering with each other's freedom, they were just kind of playing games at the meeting.
How do people's parents cope when their kids go back and they expect more respect or more control over them?
You would have thought that parents, who take the very brave decision to spend six thousand pounds a year of their own money to send a child to Summerhill — you would have thought that having taking that decision they would in some sense be in agreement with the aims of the school. However, what you get is parents who put pressure on their children during the holidays to go to lessons. They say to their children, "Now you really ought to learn to read, shouldn't you? You really ought to learn to write, and you really ought to learn about this, and you really ought to learn about that." They don't put it quite like that, they just sort of put pressure on. It's very easy for parents to pressurise children without realising. And so what happens is, you get children who come to school and go to lessons for the first two weeks, and then after that they get in the swing of life at the school again and they stop going. I used to put them all in the same class so I could have a free period.
In a way, the problem is that parents and children have different expectations. And sometimes, if the children weren't meeting the expectations that the parents had at the end of the term, then the parents would have a problem with that. It's a very difficult line for the school to draw between what's a child's private business, which we really oughtn't to talk to parents about if children don't want us to, and what is actually parents' business. From my point of view, going to lessons definitely isn't, and if parents came to me and said "Is so-and-so going to lessons?" I'd say, "You'll really have to ask them, I'm not going to tell you." So it's a very difficult question, it's true, and we did sometimes have conflicts with parents.
I can go back to what Neill said about this. He said, "The best parents are the ones who say: Summerhill's the school for my children and that's where I want to send them." Sometimes, however, you get a situation where children go to Summerhill, perhaps because they've been expelled from everywhere else, or maybe the father wants them to go there and the mother doesn't or the other way round — something like that. And so you get these conflicts, and that's very difficult. It's much better when children and their parents live in harmony. And if the parents fully believe in what the children are doing that's really important, and that's the case with Hannah for example. I completely support your decision not to send your children to school; looking at the schools the way they are, I think that you can easily justify that decision. But the point is not whether I believe that decision's the right one or not, but that you're doing what you believe is right for your child. And sometimes parents at Summerhill don't quite seem to be doing that, and that used to cause some problems.