Summerhill Takeaway

I was a teacher at Summerhill School for six years and now I am not. I want to reflect on a question that many visitors to the school posed. ´Freedom is all very well here,´they would say, ´but this is a privileged setting. What can we take away from Summerhill?
What can you take away? And how can you avoid confusing or perverting the message when you attempt to transplant it into another situation? I have seen enough of ´family meetings´that try to ape something Summerhillian in the home to know that this is a perversion. I´ve seen parents being bullied by their children under the name of liberty so it seems that freedom itself can be perverted. And I´ve seen school councils with a democratic appearance that merely reinforce the heirarchical and authoritarian structures of the schools in which they have been ´gifted´by improving adults. No, if you want to take something away it must be something more honest and less obvious.
Children tend to say they like being at Summerhill because they can ´do what they like´. This simple idea is difficult to grasp and even when you have grasped it intellectually it takes a long time to enact. Do you do what you like? Think back over the past week and consider well whether you were doing what you liked, what you chose to do. Think also whether you liked waht you were doing.
Typically adults say things like: ´That´s all very well, but you can´t just do what you like. If everyone did what they liked the world would come to a standstill.´ Or they might say, ´You can´t just do what you like all the time. If you did the world would come to a standstill. Sometimes you have to face up to the real world. There are unpleasant things that you have to do. You may not like them, but they have to be done.´ Or they might say, ´I´ve had to give up a damn lot in my life to get where I am. You can´t tell me I would have done all that if I´d done just what I liked all the time.´
Well, Summerhill doesn´t come to a standstill. It seems to carry itself forward reasonably well without insisting that people do things that they don´t want to. And I suppose for those children, their world is just as real as the real worlds of those who fill their experience with things they don´t like doing. Besides, there are some areas in which the absolute ´do as you will´idea is moderated by the requirements of living in a community. This is the famous Summerhillian distinction between freedom and licence: you can do what you like so long as it doesn´t interfere with someone else´s freedom to do what they like.
This famoous dictum fits just about anywhere. You don´t have to be in a school or institution of any kind. In this world of more-or-less fucked up relationships a bit of ´do as you like´would really untie some knots. For example, next time someone says to you, ´I´ve got to go and see my gran´ you might say, ´Do what you like.´ Not only say it, mind, but truly mean it. Have the deep belief and awareness that what you choose to do is in your own power to alter. This is the case even if you have very limited options to choose from due to circumstances (lack of money, lack of time, pressures of work, family, social and political environments). It is always possible to take back the responsibility for your own decision-making, to turn away the ´helpful´interference of those who want to take away your freedom, and to insist that those around you make their own decisions without making you the butt and scapegoat. Let´s look at each of these dimensions in turn.
Taking responsibility for your own decisions means not existing in servile dependence on what those around you want. That´s not good for you and it´s not good for them either. The dependence can be justified along the lines of ´No-one will love me if I say what I really want, so I´d better find out what everyone else wants first before I reveal anything.´ I think it´s pretty easy to see that unfair this is on everyone around you. Everyone does it a bit, but if you find yourself in a chronic pattern of not doing as you like because you are waiting to find out what others like first, then you need to get a grip and take back the responsibility for your own decisions.
´Helpful´interference can be so subtly disguised that you don´t recognise it. It may be wrapped in emotional or intellectual paper, but the essential import will be the same: what you want to do is less important and vital than what you should do. An example of emotional wrapping would be: ´Mum will be expecting us.´ Do you see how cleverly that takes away all the power and responsibility from you to make the decision about what you are going to do? I bet mum wouldn´t want that either. An example of intellectual wrapping would be, ´There is a requirement to fulfil the conditions of the third clause.´ You can see, I imagine, that by intellectual I do not mean reflective or thinking. These kinds of conditions are frequently imposed by bureaucratic minds- not the triumph of humanity. They like to make you feel powerless but it is easy to reframe the situation by taking control of your ability to do what you like.
If you do this yourself you are doing a lot, but once you have really digested the message you will find that insist others around you do it too: don´t take responsibility for other people´s decision-making because you cannot decide for them what they want. You can tell when you are in one of these situations because you will feel the hackles rising on your neck and start to get the sensation that the person in front of you is not talking to you but to some superimposed image of a parent, teacher or friend from the past. ´I can´t decide what I want until you tell me...´ This is the basic message you want to fend off. And if you do not fend it off there will be consequences: ´It´s your fault that I´m not happy/entertained/successful etc.´ So when someone asks, ´Shall I have an ice-cream?´the only correct answer is, ´Do what you like.´ It may sound rude but it is a hell of a lot better than living in psychological dependence.
So, in a nutshell, I think the best thing you can take away from Summerhill is to do as you like. Pass the thought through your head many times a day and in conversations and social situations always recur to it. If you find yourself saying, ´I don´t really want to be here, but...´just cut yourself short, say what you do want and get on with it. No-one will miss your prevarications if you become more decisive in this way. There will also be a general increase in the levels of maturity around you. I´ll talk about maturity next because the funny thing about Summerhill is that a lot of the kids are more ´mature´than the adults: now why would that be?