What is most interesting in making a comparison with Niell’s Summerhill school is the idea of “Freedom.” Eric Fromm gives us a new way to allow these the two texts to interact through his ideas of overt authority vs. anonymous authority. Overt authority uses physical force while anonymous authority uses psychic manipulation. The Summerhill School and Kozols Free School are radically different and yet, they both insist they are a “Free” school. I want to examine the nature of the anonymous authority used in the justification of these schools.
Jonathan Kozol’s idea of a free school is a result of an ideology that we have not seen before. Some few dozen parents of children of the Boston Public School and Kozol decided to build a school outside of the public system and available for free to kids who had no money. This school is unique for it is “free” in both sense of the term, Free from the system (however they perceived it to be) and free also in regards to monetary charges for participation. This is an admirable venture, but reading Kozol’s account of its birth seems to demonstrate the extreme nature of Kozol’s (and more than likely, the founding parents’) philosophy of the world and of education in that world. Upon discovering that there are other schools that identity themselves as “Free” School’s Kozol is determined to defend his school as singularly unique in principle in the section ‘Free school as a term meaning too many different things: what other people mean-what I mean-what I do not mean.’
He attacks Summerhill-type schools which are “physically isolated, politically noncontroversial, and generally all-white, high-tuition”(7). He sees these schools as existing within a moral vacuum where children do not learn about the reality of an unjust society that must be made right. He says “In my belief, an isolated upper-class Free School for the children of the white and rich within a land like that united states and in a time of torment such as 1972 is a great deal too much like a sand box for the children of the S.S. guards at Auschwitz”(11). This comparison is an disconcerting one. This is a comparison made to demonstrate what he feels is inevitable. Despite feeling so earnestly that they are allowing their children to develop freely from “American system as a whole, and …its agencies of devastation, power, and oppression,”(10) the result of such an isolated education leaves them with no idea of what the system even is, if it exists, how it function, let alone how to stop it. Kozol argues that even in physical retreat from American society, “the beautiful children of the rich and powerful…are going to be condemned to weird that power also” (10) The children are and will continue to directly profit from the structure of oppression of which they are the beneficiaries at the top. It is the capitalist mentality of the rich that does not easily allow them to escape their position as oppressors within the greater society as is demonstrated by the existence and philosophy of such schools as Summerhill. A large degree of personal freedom is ensured for the child, but within the bounds of ideological isolation and false reality that everyone is free and all is as it should be. This explains somewhat the comparison made earlier between the children of the rich in 1972 to the children of the S.S. These children are developing in ignorance of the “smoke [rising] over Dachau”(12), in complete obliviousness to the structure from which they benefit, and obviate their ability to destroy it.
Kozol understands the discomfort that this parallel might register in its readers and mentions so, but finds it necessary. He fills this text with extreme words and ideas. Even in the beginning, he mentions people “from the outside” as people who will not understand his writing because he writes about “the people on the inside”(v). Then he sets the Nazi comparison wherein we were to extrapolate that these people on the inside are equivalent to the victims of the holocaust. The philosophy of Kozol and the parents seems to be born in resentment towards all that is on the outside. But with their understanding of the structure of violence that functions within American society against them, such distinct polarities are more than some-what justified.
Fromm, in support of Niell’s Summerhill School, seeks to justify education without force and explains its perceived failure as due to one main cause the inability of parents and teachers to distinguish between progressive non-authoritarian education and “education by means of persuasion and hidden coercion”(xi). To him and Niell, Summerhill is an educational environment where progressive education really takes place and true freedom for the child is able to manifest.
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