![]() ![]() ![]() Meetings are held to determine school rules and pupils have equal voting rights with school staff. In addition to this novel attendance policy, the school is democratic. ![]() Neill founded Summerhill school on the basis that children should not be compelled to attend lessons. He felt that deprivation of this sense of freedom during childhood and all the consequent unhappiness experienced by the repressed child was responsible for much if not all of the psychological disorders of adulthood. This idea was extremely controversial at the time today, while not nearly universally accepted, the concept does have other advocates, such as some in the unschooling movement. Neill believed that the happiness of the child was a paramount consideration in the child's upbringing and that a fundamental contribution to this happiness was the maintenance of a sense of personal freedom in the child. During this period, his growing discontent could be traced in notes which he later published: he described himself as "just enough of a Nietzschian to protest against teaching children to be meek and lowly" and wrote (in A Dominie's Log) that he was "trying to form minds that will question and destroy and rebuild". In 1914 he became headmaster of the Gretna Green School in Scotland. After acting as a pupil-teacher for his father, he studied at the University of Edinburgh and obtained an M.A. Neill was born in Forfar, the son of a schoolteacher. 7 John Holt, another non-coercive direction. ![]()
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