Summerhill School

What Hacker News says

1. cycomanicAug 2020
   For people interested in this topic I highly recommend reading about summerhill school [1] and similar projects. The topic of alternative schooling systems is quite fascinating.

   [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

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2. barry-cotterJul 2019
   Almost all of your points boil down to homeschooled children not being convenient for teachers used to children who have been in day school since they were of school age. If the only bad result of your reading lots of manuals was poor grades in English for a few years this is of no consequence. Learning to express one’s thoughts about things you care about is a very different skill from imitating research in English literature.

   If you want to learn more about democratic and child centred education as practiced at Summerhill I can highly recommend the founding Headmaster, A.S. Neill’s book on the school, Summerhill[1]. You are of course free to believe whatever you want about child centred methods of education but Summerhill’s students are not handicapped in life success or exams by the freedom to attend lessons or not as they choose, not are Sudbury’s[2].

   You do not need an “impartial assessment” to know how well children are reading if you can read at the level of a university graduate. You can look at the books they read for pleasure and assess the level for yourself. If the child doesn’t quite get it but they’re close enough to try to read those books and enjoy them that’s a good thing.

   The idea that you should take care not to contradict the curriculum is ... Education is meant to be for children, not teachers.

   [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School

   [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

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3. staredJul 2016
   An obligatory reference:

   A. S. Neill "Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" (1960), especially chapter 1 (about the Summerhill school itself). The schools started in 1920s, and sadly, we made no progress in that direction in the last century.

   Link: https://trisquel.info/files/summerhill-english_1.pdf

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4. staredNov 2015
   For all interested in alternative approaches to education, I recommend A. S. Neill "Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing" (1960), especially chapter 1 (about the Summerhill school itself). The schools started in 1920s, and sadly, we made no progress in that direction in the last century.

   Link: https://trisquel.info/files/summerhill-english_1.pdf

   thread
5. unaloneNov 2011
   I think this is an example of limited perspective. I spent two recent summers working with kids ages 9-17 and was delighted at their curiosity, brightness, and willingness to get involved in elaborate conversations. Granted, the older kids were also trying to get in each others' pants, but that's the fun of being a kid, right?

   I don't mind the social networking junk too much either; it's detrimental in the short term but everybody I know is getting weary of how pointless it is. I've been reading A. S. Neill's fantastic Summerhill School, where he details the things he learned after 50 years of teaching children, and he argues that letting children play is essential to their growing up properly. Freedom to play eventually leads to kids deciding what they most enjoy doing, and it leads to them being more willing to work within their society. Since reading that, I've wondered if social networks aren't just our modern form of play: useless wastes of time objectively, but people will move on from them and find better things to do.

   (I hope. Facebook/the status feed are still only half a decade old. If five more years pass and everybody's still just as hooked, we've got a problem; I think we'll see feed obsession subside, but I could very well be wrong.)

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6. eevilspockMar 2016
   Tolstoy, after he became an anarchist, believed that education should be devoid of coercion, and inspired many anarchist inspired education experiments around the turn of the century (1900).

   From Tolstoy's Wikipedia page: "Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana and founded 13 schools for children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. Tolstoy described the school's principles in his 1862 essay 'The School at Yasnaya Polyana'. Tolstoy's educational experiments were short-lived, partly due to harassment by the Tsarist secret police. However, as a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, the school at Yasnaya Polyana can justifiably be claimed the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education."

   Politics and Culture in Anarchist Education: The Modern School of New York and Stelton, 1911-1915: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1179429?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

   The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College: http://news.infoshop.org/education/unlikely-history-tolstoy-...

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