Summerhill
A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
by A. S. Neill · first published 1926
53% recommend47% neutral
Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing is a book about the English boarding school Summerhill School by its headmaster A. S. Neill. It is known for introducing his ideas to the American public. It was published in America on November 7, 1960, by the Hart Publishing Company and later revised as Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood in 1993. Its contents are a repackaged collection from four of Neill's previous works. The foreword was written by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who distinguished between authoritarian coercion and Summerhill. The seven chapters of the book cove
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…education systems later on my own (and this is not to say this university maths teacher course was a good one, quite the opposite). If you want to know what great education at the time looked like, read up on Summerhill -- it was founded in 1921 but humanistic education has been around for centuries.
on “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann” ↗…books from the 60s on this topic, including Paul Goodman's "Compulsory Miseducation" --- which you can read online at http://gyanpedia.in/Portals/0/Toys%20from%20Trash/Resources/... --- and A.S. Neill's Summerhill, and Dennison's The Lives of Children. All three offer a formal framework for addressing this topic: how we learn and develop is a psychological matter, not one of grades, nor figuring out how to fill…
on “Against School - John Taylor Gatto” ↗This article reads like an almost verbatim regurgitation of A. S. Neill's points in Summerhill, his excellent book on the school that he built and the "free school" system that he pioneered. Neill's belief in the inherent goodness of children and the power of freedom on their development resonated…
on “The school that hates rules” ↗I only went at the age of 15, after dropping out of high school as a birthday present to myself and discovering the book Summerhill (about a similar school in England). It was probably the happiest time of my life, because it was the first time my school wasn't a prison and I had the freedom to pursue my curiosity. And I went to…
on “The school that hates rules” ↗https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill - changed the way how I think about society. Very good book for parents. Explains why people are prone to manipulation and following a bad leader. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2053923.What_Every_Paren...…
on “Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?” ↗A great book with a similar perspective is Summerhill by A. S. Neil. We do Sudbury inspired home schooling. My daughter learned to read "late" by most standards (at age 9), but once she decided to it only took her a few weeks to be at the same level as…
on “I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected” ↗…the "4 hour work week" by Tim Ferriss. I've read it at about the same age and it had a profound effect on me. Another book I'd suggest is the Enchiridion of Epictetus. If you ever intend to have kids, "Summerhill" by A.S.Neill is a good choice.
on “Ask HN: What book should I buy for my 18th birthday?” ↗An interesting book on this topic: Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing Also: A guy tought pre-school kids how to solve linear equations. But he was an outsider so butthurt academics buried his research even though it was proven to be…
on “100 Bad Habits Learned at School” ↗> I really wish people wouldn’t trying “hacking” education. Does innovation in general bother you? Besides, what we're doing isn't a very new idea. We are predominantly inspired by the 1960 book Summerhill by A. S. Neill, and even he was inspired by prior art (This isn't the only inspiration, but it's a good tldr in a way) > Sure the system has its faults For us, those faults are deal breakers, but I…
on “How I Taught My Kid to Read” ↗Check out the book I mentioned, Summerhill by AS Neill for how it could work at scale. We do it ourselves because there is no analogy to Summerhill where we live, so I agree with you in that regard
on “How I Taught My Kid to Read” ↗From my knowledge of radical education approaches like Summerhill or Ferrer's Modern School, I would agree with that, with one caveat: Students don't have to attend class. They just have to go to school. They can choose, on a daily basis, what class they want to…
on “How My School and District Failed its Students” ↗…pre-jail or pre-industry subsidized holding pens for children while adults go do "real work." Making schooling "democratic" while the rest of a nation remains un-democratic is like pissing in the ocean. [1]Summerhill, Waldorf etc... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
on “Make School a Democracy” ↗> That is not modern parenting, that's just parenting. Aside from some fringe philosophies (Summerhill for example) I have yet to come across any seriously taken historical example of parenting advice that is not focused on shaping children into something the parent desires, even if that is a very loose…
on “Raising a moral child” ↗Hmm, it seems the quote I'm thinking of must have been in an extended edition of Summerhill that I've since given away. I remember Neill saying in an aside that he never had luck forming children's characters after they were about seven, and he compared it to the Jesuit assertion "give me the…
on “The school that hates rules” ↗…but the way instruction is structured is ludicrously inefficient in terms of using children’s time. You can teach a nine year old to read in 50 hours. The graduates of democratic schools like Sudbury or Summerhill don’t even have classes and they do fine in life. School looks like an institution designed to get people used to sitting down, shutting up and doing as they’re told. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.h...
on “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991)” ↗