A. S. Neill and Children’s Freedom: The Evolution of a Radical Idea

A. S. Neill was the founder of the school of Summerhill, an experimental school known for permitting students to choose when and what they wanted to learn. Neill started Summerhill to explore one main idea: children’s freedom. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Neill believed that human nature suffocates under the norms of schooling and society, and he searched for ways to break these norms, so that children would become truly free, happy, and equipped to reject authority when they enter society. In his prolific writings, Neill explained his ideas about children’s needs for love and respect and exemplified a purely democratic school, in which adults and children make decisions in a one-person-one-vote mode. Neill’s work inspired the free schooling movement in the USA, a movement that was particularly active between the 1960s and 1970s. The free school ideology involved adopting a moral vision for education to promote a just society and better quality of life. However, the movement was silenced due to the instrumentalization of education, and Neill’s message about children’s freedom remains relatively unexplored.