Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood
by A. S. Neill
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $8.00
Your Save: $ 6.95 ( 46% )
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Manufacturer: St. Martin's Griffin
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 372.94264
EAN: 9780312141370
ISBN: 0312141378
Label: St. Martin's Griffin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 269
Publication Date: 1995-09-15
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Studio: St. Martin's Griffin
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Are you kidding me?
Comment: I have taught high school for eight years and this book is complete anarchist/utopian propaganda...Complete dream land sort of idealism that will create young people that both know nothing and are obsessively self-indulgent. The idea that adults have very little to teach young people and they should only do what they "feel like" is just silly. I see "free and unstructured" classrooms all the time in my teaching experience and I can tell you very little learning takes place. As a matter of fact, the students will tell you too. Common sense dictates this (something most progressives lack because of their preoccupation with a utopian vision). Most students hate such situations and appreciate a teacher who creates a loving (yet structured) environment and teaches them to love a subject they may have never experienced on their own. This structure doesn't have to mean bootcamp discipline, which is the straw man that many radical progressives present it as. How many teachers have inspired a love of art, history, mathematics, music, science, or literature? Countless. How many "imposed" their "curriculum" on the students through their requirements and structure? Most of the best ones for sure. Even great teachers that give students some choices do so in a structure that is geared toward success. The reality is that the best teachers LEAD and inspire students everyday and students thank them for it, albeit sometimes many years later. Summerhill is a radical progressive/anarchist school that plays to the worst of human nature: unchecked self-indulgence. Anyone with a child knows you don't have to teach a child to be selfish, you have to teach them to care and be respectful of others (that includes the idea that you can learn from others too!) The problem with allowing students to make all the choices and adults just having "one of the votes" is that young people OFTEN make the wrong choices. Example: At Summerhill, Neill himself wanted to limit smoking to anyone over 12, yet the students outvoted him and abolished the age limit! Yeah, Summerhill is just what we need for our youth!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great ideal to aspire to
Comment: Clearly public education cannot hope to replicate Summerhill's system of allowing children to go to class only when they want to. However, the message that could be applied to public education is that children do not need to be pressured into learning. Summerhill shows that, if you show children caring support, they will eventually come around and listen to your advice and respect the caring expectations (as opposed to demanding expectations) you have for their lives.
My vision of public education is one that does not use grades, evaluations and rewards to pressure students into learning. Education should not just be about preparing children to plug the open jobs in the economy; it should enable students to excel in all aspects of life within society: how to stay healthy, how to be a caring person, etc. These issues arise naturally out of studying subjects like biology and literature, but only when the emphasis is taken away from grading and rewards, which often overshadow the true benefits that education has to offer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Where will the children play (and learn)
Comment: In the time when education was to be the agent of change in an unjust society Summerhill was one of many experiments examining more humane ways to "educate" children. It was as idiosyncratic as its creator and much of that comes through in the book. The vision and passion of one man and the teachers and parents who believed in the process is clearly described here.
Today, when politicians are arguing that teachers need not be prepared to teach and that merely having a bachelor's degree is enough to educate students, Summerhill seems like a distant dream. The focus on understanding children and the ways they learn, grow and develop into confident adults seems so removed from a "No Child Left Behind" standardized test world.
Nontheless, this book should inspire parents and educators who can see the impact of this school on the children who attended it. The current work on democratic schools (see James Beane and Micheal Apple's work) and critical pedagogy (see Ira Shor's "When Students have power") are movements that take some of the the ideas and momentum of Summerhill's time and move them forward with new knowledge about learning. Long live education for change.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Childrearing Book To Date
Comment: Neill's message is to have faith in the child, respect the child and honor the child's proper developmental timetable. Neill was not an anarchist but a humanist and made a point to not impinge upon the child's natural unfolding by presenting premature responsibilities upon her or him. It is rare to find a school like Summerhill that respects a young person's childhood and innocence, that allows the child to grow and develop at his or her own pace.
I highly recommend Summerhill as an uplifting and enlightened treatise on children by an educator with experience and humanity that is largely unsurpassed by an educator.
Customer Rating:
Summary: anarcho-syndical-communist, not a socialist
Comment: I read the original "Summerhill" in 1980 when I was in high school. I was completely blown away by the concepts, despite the fact that I grew up in Sudbury, MA, where there was a similar school. I was lucky enough to be exposed to this environment of freedom and flourished in it. I would not have traded it for anything.
But I must disagree with the characterization of A.S. Neill as a socialist. He may have had socialist tendencies, but he was more a Paul Goodman-style anarchist. Socialism is the regulation and limiting of actions by certain parties; anarchism is the opposite -- the deregulation of everything. And this is the environment that A.S. Neill fostered at Summerhill, to his credit.
It's really sad that the trend in the United States is towards the very opposite: the complete regulation of children's lives, scheduled down to the minute with safety the being the top priority. This tendency is creating a generation of children who lack spontaneity and creativity.
We need more free schools like Summerhill.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Are you kidding me?
Comment: I have taught high school for eight years and this book is complete anarchist/utopian propaganda...Complete dream land sort of idealism that will create young people that both know nothing and are obsessively self-indulgent. The idea that adults have very little to teach young people and they should only do what they "feel like" is just silly. I see "free and unstructured" classrooms all the time in my teaching experience and I can tell you very little learning takes place. As a matter of fact, the students will tell you too. Common sense dictates this (something most progressives lack because of their preoccupation with a utopian vision). Most students hate such situations and appreciate a teacher who creates a loving (yet structured) environment and teaches them to love a subject they may have never experienced on their own. This structure doesn't have to mean bootcamp discipline, which is the straw man that many radical progressives present it as. How many teachers have inspired a love of art, history, mathematics, music, science, or literature? Countless. How many "imposed" their "curriculum" on the students through their requirements and structure? Most of the best ones for sure. Even great teachers that give students some choices do so in a structure that is geared toward success. The reality is that the best teachers LEAD and inspire students everyday and students thank them for it, albeit sometimes many years later. Summerhill is a radical progressive/anarchist school that plays to the worst of human nature: unchecked self-indulgence. Anyone with a child knows you don't have to teach a child to be selfish, you have to teach them to care and be respectful of others (that includes the idea that you can learn from others too!) The problem with allowing students to make all the choices and adults just having "one of the votes" is that young people OFTEN make the wrong choices. Example: At Summerhill, Neill himself wanted to limit smoking to anyone over 12, yet the students outvoted him and abolished the age limit! Yeah, Summerhill is just what we need for our youth!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great ideal to aspire to
Comment: Clearly public education cannot hope to replicate Summerhill's system of allowing children to go to class only when they want to. However, the message that could be applied to public education is that children do not need to be pressured into learning. Summerhill shows that, if you show children caring support, they will eventually come around and listen to your advice and respect the caring expectations (as opposed to demanding expectations) you have for their lives.
My vision of public education is one that does not use grades, evaluations and rewards to pressure students into learning. Education should not just be about preparing children to plug the open jobs in the economy; it should enable students to excel in all aspects of life within society: how to stay healthy, how to be a caring person, etc. These issues arise naturally out of studying subjects like biology and literature, but only when the emphasis is taken away from grading and rewards, which often overshadow the true benefits that education has to offer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Where will the children play (and learn)
Comment: In the time when education was to be the agent of change in an unjust society Summerhill was one of many experiments examining more humane ways to "educate" children. It was as idiosyncratic as its creator and much of that comes through in the book. The vision and passion of one man and the teachers and parents who believed in the process is clearly described here.
Today, when politicians are arguing that teachers need not be prepared to teach and that merely having a bachelor's degree is enough to educate students, Summerhill seems like a distant dream. The focus on understanding children and the ways they learn, grow and develop into confident adults seems so removed from a "No Child Left Behind" standardized test world.
Nontheless, this book should inspire parents and educators who can see the impact of this school on the children who attended it. The current work on democratic schools (see James Beane and Micheal Apple's work) and critical pedagogy (see Ira Shor's "When Students have power") are movements that take some of the the ideas and momentum of Summerhill's time and move them forward with new knowledge about learning. Long live education for change.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Childrearing Book To Date
Comment: Neill's message is to have faith in the child, respect the child and honor the child's proper developmental timetable. Neill was not an anarchist but a humanist and made a point to not impinge upon the child's natural unfolding by presenting premature responsibilities upon her or him. It is rare to find a school like Summerhill that respects a young person's childhood and innocence, that allows the child to grow and develop at his or her own pace.
I highly recommend Summerhill as an uplifting and enlightened treatise on children by an educator with experience and humanity that is largely unsurpassed by an educator.
Customer Rating:
Summary: anarcho-syndical-communist, not a socialist
Comment: I read the original "Summerhill" in 1980 when I was in high school. I was completely blown away by the concepts, despite the fact that I grew up in Sudbury, MA, where there was a similar school. I was lucky enough to be exposed to this environment of freedom and flourished in it. I would not have traded it for anything.
But I must disagree with the characterization of A.S. Neill as a socialist. He may have had socialist tendencies, but he was more a Paul Goodman-style anarchist. Socialism is the regulation and limiting of actions by certain parties; anarchism is the opposite -- the deregulation of everything. And this is the environment that A.S. Neill fostered at Summerhill, to his credit.
It's really sad that the trend in the United States is towards the very opposite: the complete regulation of children's lives, scheduled down to the minute with safety the being the top priority. This tendency is creating a generation of children who lack spontaneity and creativity.
We need more free schools like Summerhill.
Originally published in 1960, Summerhill became an instant bestseller and a classic volume of education for an entire generation. Now, this thoroughly expanded and revised version of the original Summerhill reinstates the revolutionary "free school" traditions begun by Summerhill's founder A.S. Neill.
As American education lags behind the rest of the world, this new edition is more timely than ever. The children of today face struggles far greater than any previous generation and we, as parents and teachers, must teach them now to make choices for themselves and to learn from the outcome of their decisions.
This classic work yet again invites a new view of childhood and presents an essential treatise that challenges us to rethink our approach to education.
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