Summerhill

IT WAS ALWAYS KNOWN to early MLC students that SUMMERHILL—which exists to this day—was the "free school" ours was based on. Founded in 1921 by British educator Alexander Sutherland (A.S.) Neill in, of all places, Hellerau (near Dresden), Germany, Summerhill was initially part of the international Neue Schule Hellerau (Hellerau New School) before splitting off and moving to Austria, then to the U.K., and in 1927 to its current location in Leiston, Suffolk, England.

Like MLC, Summerhill's philosophy was and is that "children learn best with freedom from coercion .... [A]ll lessons are optional, and pupils are free to choose what to do with their time .... [T]he function of a child is to live his own life—not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, not a life according to the purpose of an educator who thinks he knows best" (from the informative Wikipedia article).

MLC was not the only school fashioned after Summerhill. Apparently quite a few were founded in the US starting in the 1960s; we may have half-siblings out there!

Some of these US schools irked Neill for not taking seriously enough his dictum, "freedom not licence" (sic), that is to say, not license to harm others. "A free school is not a place where you can run roughshod over other people," wrote Mel Snyder, an educator quoted in the 1970 book Summerhill USA.

"Look at those American Summerhill schools," Neill himself wrote. "I sent a letter to the Greenwich Village Voice, in New York, disclaiming any affiliation with any American school that calls itself a Summerhill school. I've heard so many rumours about them. It's one thing to use freedom. Quite another to use licence."

With trepidation, it might be good to know how MLC would have rated. Okay I think!

MLC's scholar-in-residence Manny Bernstein studied Neill closely, dedicating his dissertation, written about MLC, to Neill as well as to "John Holt, Carl Rogers, Erik Erikson, Rudolf Dreikurs, Khalil Gibran, George Dennison, John Young, and all of those other sages in the literature who have inspired me."

Neill died in 1973; it appears Manny may have met him. When Manny died in 2015, he left behind his personal copy of Neill's 1967 book, Talking of Summerhill, which family friend and MLC alumna Libby Shapiro kindly donated to the MLC archive in 2019. On its flyleaf is Neill's inscription to Manny, dated May 1967. On this web page are images of the cover, Neill's inscription, the glossy photo of Neill Manny kept taped inside the front cover, and Libby's lovely note of transmittal.

Also on this page are images of a paragraph from p. 61 of the dissertation, citing Neill, and a still shot of Manny, walking and reading, in his role as The Librarian from the 1970 MLC student film A Moving Picture.

Much information about A.S. Neill and Summerhill School is available online—notably, this fine short film from 1964 featuring the man himself.

Manny Bernstein's personal copy of Neill's book

Neill's handwritten dedication to Manny

Manny, reading

Glossy of Neill inside Manny's book

Dissertation paragraph concerning Summerhill

Libby Shapiro's note to Sam Lowry