Kozol and Neill

I was really upset when I woke up this morning (afternoon?) to find out that my phone has died in the night, and along with it my hopes of engaging in a discussion about the Kozol and Summerhill readings. I spent last night engaged with these readings and was hoping to contribute because of the powerful emotional responses that I felt both evoked from me. L sorry classmates…

I began with the Kozol reading and had every intention of reading the Sudbury Valley school one after skimming both of them and deciding that I didn’t want to read the Summerhill one. It looked like it had a lot of things that I was going to disagree with and therefore ruffle my feathers, and I was in a more agreeable mood that I did not want to destroy. However, after reading the Kozol one I felt compelled to read the one on Summerhill because he mentions these schools to emphasize his point about Free Schools not being able “with sanity, with candor, or with truth, endeavor to exist within a moral vacuum.” He states that these Summerhill schools at best, are “obviating pain and etherizing evil; at worst, they constitute a registered escape valve for political rebellion.” Of course this intrigued me, and even though I try not to examine texts with rhetorical appeals, I found that his use of pathos in comparing these Free Schools with the situation in Nazi Germany was very compelling. the emotional vigor it stirred in me, naturally, led me to the Summerhill argument. I do admit, however, (and I do not know if this was Spady’s point or not), that I began to read the entire article with bias, and I was ready to pick it apart. At the end, even without this emotional preparation, I still felt that my attitude towards the Summerhill schools would not have been much different.

I found many statements in the Summerhill article that I found reinforced these notions of indifference and almost selfishness from their seclusion of the world that Kozol seems to suggest. One question asked is “Are the children at Summerhill interested in politics? No. That may be because they are middle-class children who have never had the experience of poverty. I make it a rule to keep the teaching staff from trying to influence the children politically.” In reading this, I agreed with not trying to influence children politically, but does that mean we should be keeping them ignorant? I feel like this is an example of how it is easy to remain in a bubble. As a whole, the Summerhill article is concerned with the happiness of an individual, but never makes a connection with the fact that an individual cannot live their life completely distinct from the rest of society. It seems that Neill hopes this can be so, but eventually the child will have to go back into the world again and will have to realize that their decisions will affect the lives of others. Neill says “He is allowed to do as he pleases in things that affect him- and only him.”, but eventually won’t these things still affect the rest of society, even if it is more indirectly? Also, in the instance with the potatoes, the problem was not an inherently emotional one, but the fact that these potatoes were Neill’s spuds. He was the only one who should handle his world and belongings, and as soon as another child interferes with this aspect of his life, he is wrong. The emphasis on whats mine is mine, and yours is yours does not seem like it will go very far in the long run of creating a functioning society. However, I suppose Neill states that “my primary job is not the reformation of society, but the bringing of happiness to some few children.” So as angry as I want to be able the fact that Summerhill does seem to act in a moral vacuum, it appears that the conflict between Kozol and Neill cannot be resolved. They inherently have different intention and goals that they believe education should serve. Doesn’t that make this conflict lasting? Does that mean then, that there are no ways in which we could reconcile these two kinds of Free Schools or even find a compromise in ideology?