Summerhill
Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing is a book about the English boarding school Summerhill School by its headmaster A. S. Neill. It is known for introducing his ideas to the American public. It was published in America on November 7, 1960, by the Hart Publishing Company and later revised as Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood in 1993. Its contents are a repackaged collection from four of Neill's previous works. The foreword was written by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who distinguished between authoritarian coercion and Summerhill. The seven chapters of the book cover the origins and implementation of the school, and other topics in childrearing. Summerhill, founded in the 1920s, is run as a children's democracy under Neill's educational philosophy of self-regulation, where kids choose whether to go to lessons and how they want to live freely without imposing on others. The school makes its rules at a weekly schoolwide meeting where students and teachers each have one vote alike. Neill discarded other pedagogies for one of the innate goodness of the child. Despite selling no advance copies in America, Summerhill brought Neill significant renown in the next decade, wherein he sold three million copies. The book was used in hundreds of college courses and translated into languages such as German. Reviewers noted Neill's charismatic personality, but doubted the project's general replicability elsewhere and its overstated generalizations.
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- An interesting book on this topic: Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
Also:
A guy tought pre-school kids how to solve linear equations. But he was an outsider so butthurt academics buried his research even though it was proven to be better:
Direct Learning, Sigfried Engelmann
https://shallteach.wordpress.com/2020/05/18/di-an-introducti...
- I expect I'll get a lot of flak for this one, but I'd like to suggest the "4 hour work week" by Tim Ferriss. I've read it at about the same age and it had a profound effect on me.
Another book I'd suggest is the Enchiridion of Epictetus. If you ever intend to have kids, "Summerhill" by A.S.Neill is a good choice.
- > Hungary had a great education system at the time.
I seriously doubt you could back this. You are generalizing from a single school. Might as well argue that socialist Hungary had a great education system because of Fazekas. Neither are true. I happen to have a maths teacher degree from a Hungarian university and we studied Hungarian education history and I learned much more about education systems later on my own (and this is not to say this university maths teacher course was a good one, quite the opposite). If you want to know what great education at the time looked like, read up on Summerhill -- it was founded in 1921 but humanistic education has been around for centuries.
- A great book with a similar perspective is Summerhill by A. S. Neil.
We do Sudbury inspired home schooling. My daughter learned to read "late" by most standards (at age 9), but once she decided to it only took her a few weeks to be at the same level as her friends who go to public school. She also learned to read 3 languages at once while her friends can only still speak just one language (part of our home schooling has been language immersion). I feel proud of what she knows, but most proud of her motivation and determination to learn what she wants to.
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178734.Summerhill - changed the way how I think about society. Very good book for parents. Explains why people are prone to manipulation and following a bad leader.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2053923.What_Every_Paren... - a very nice book about neuroscience for parents
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26329.Emotional_Intellig... - changed the way how I think about emotions and interactions with people
- This article reads like an almost verbatim regurgitation of A. S. Neill's points in Summerhill, his excellent book on the school that he built and the "free school" system that he pioneered.
Neill's belief in the inherent goodness of children and the power of freedom on their development resonated strongly with me. However, Summerhill was a unique book written by an eloquent man - almost a statement of philosophy, rather than a well-researched manual. Which is fine for a pioneer. Unfortunately this article does not add anything to the subject, and is really just a reiteration of arguments made half a century ago (without even quoting the original title).
