SUMMERHILL POLICY STATEMENTS
The following three documents are a statement of the aims and objectives of Summerhill
School:
• General Policy Statement (A.S. Neill)
• Summerhill General Policy Statement
• Policy Statement (Community Life)
As an introduction, here are some extracts from the book ‘Summerhill – a radical approach
to child rearing’ by the school’s founder, A.S. Neill.
A.S. Neill is widely considered to be one of the great educators of the time. UNESCO list
him as one of the 100 most influential educational thinkers and he was also listed as one of
twelve greatest educators of the last millennium by a UK national broadsheet newspaper in
December 1999.
His writings, together with other radical thinkers of the period such as Bertrand Russell,
confronted the values of the establishments for many years.
This piece stands as an example of his challenging views on education and freedom for
children. It is reproduced here to give some background and history to the Summerhill Policy
Statements.
‘I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest. Education
should be a preparation for life. Our culture has not been very successful. Our education,
politics and economics lead to war. Our medicines have not done away with disease. Our
religion has not abolished usury and robbery. The advances of the age are advances in
mechanism – in communications and computers, in science and technology. New wars
threaten, for the world’s social conscience is still primitive.
If we feel like questioning today, we can pose a few awkward questions. Why does man hate
and kill in war when animals do not? Why does cancer increase? Why are there so many
suicides? So many insane sex crimes? Why the hate that is racism? Why the need for drugs to
enhance life? Why backbiting and spite? Why is sex obscene and a leering joke? Why
degradation and torture? Why the continuance of religions that have long ago lost their love
and hope and charity? Why, a thousand whys about our vaulted state of civilised eminence!?
I ask these questions because I am by profession a teacher, one that deals with the young. I
ask these questions because those so often asked by teachers are the unimportant ones, the
ones about French or ancient history or what not when these subjects don’t matter a jot
compared to the larger questions of life’s fulfilment – of man’s inner happiness.
How much of our education is real doing, real self-expression? Handwork is too often the
making of a wooden box under the eye of an expert. Even the Montessori system, well known
as a system of directed play, is an artificial way of making the child learn by doing. It has
nothing creative about it.
In the home the child is always being taught. In almost every home there is at least one
ungrown-up grown-up who rushes to show Tommy how his new engine works. There is
