Sunday, January 31, 2010

Sort-Crossing at Summerhill

Greta Sergeant on A.S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill school in the UK, as quoted in Jonathan Croall, Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel (NY: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 229—

Once he [Neill] visited a school in Stockholm, and was taken in to a geography lesson. He went up to the map on the wall, pointed to Italy, and said: "This is London." The pupils stared at him in surprise. At Summerhill when he did things like that, they laughed and told him he was a silly fool.