A. S. Neill
From Philosopedia
Neill, A(lexander) S(utherland) (17 October 1883 – 23 September 1973)
Neill, a Scottish headmaster of the Summerhill School in Leiston, Suffolk, England, was internationally known for his Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960, with a foreword by Erich Fromm). Other of his works were The Problem Teacher (1939), Hearts, Not Heads (1945), The Problem Family (1948), The Free Child (1953); and Talking of Summerhill (1967, its American title being Freedom, Not License).
Neill’s progressive coeducational Summerhill School at Leiston, England, included optional attendance, a school parliament, and no religious instruction.
Some educators continue to debate his philosophy. A friend of Wilhelm Reich, Neill accompanied Reich’s wife, Ilse Ollendorff, mother of their son Peter, to the public school in New Canaan, Connecticut, where she and Warren Allen Smith were teachers in the 1960s. Neill was nonplused by the elaborate and air-conditioned facilities, the comfortable chairs, the imposing library, the planetarium, the audio-visual studio which piped programs to classrooms, the science laboratories, the athletic rooms and fields. “How can you teach in such a place!” he marveled, stating that his own school had only the most elementary facilities.
Told of the influence of John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick upon the school's art and English department’s educational philosophy, Neill continued to marvel, highly approving of what he observed.
Over coffee, he told of some of his “radical” ideas, adding that “radical” comes from radix, root, and his educational philosophy aimed at the roots of teaching. Asked about his philosophic outlook, he scoffed to Smith at organized religion and stated that he was continually formulating his philosophy, that he did not expect to finish the task nor did he think that that would be desirable.
