For D.R.B., Wherever You Are
Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 5:00 am
I had to buy a book last week before Amazon would let me leave a 'review'--a 'comment', really, since I hadn't read it--for a biblically based book about the benefits of baby beating. My childhood was filled with "Mickey Mouse' and 'Woody Woodpecker' so cut me some slack! I'd been wanting something by A.S. Neill anyway so I just went for "Summerhill School--A New View of Childhood". I don't even know if other choices were available. I was in do-something-even-if-it's-wrong mode, wanted to get on with my comment, for which I still had to wait for clearance, as it turned out.
It also turns out that there's nothing about this Summerhill book that I don't like so far (at this point up to page 70 of 269). Neill makes clear his school's (and his own) limits and shortcomings. It would be almost impossible to point out the "good parts" because so far as I can tell the entire thing is outstanding. The one disappointment I can think of so far (bottom of p. 45) is that he said he "realized" that telling a mother who had been beating her three-year-old son how she was teaching him to hate life would be telling her something that "wouldn't sink in", so he did nothing, sounds like. But even that admission is out in the open, un-expertlike and I think therefore admirable.
A theme he has repeated maybe close to a half-dozen times by page 70 is that he had to finally stop crediting what he calls his "psychoanalysis" of certain problem kids with "curing" them, since the problem kids he hadn't personally treated became "cured" at an identical rate. He says over and over that it's freedom that does it. Freedom to be themselves and freedom from fear of authority.
But what made me think of you was our coincidental attempts at trying to calculate just how many trained mental health professionals it would take to change this lightbulb, if you remember that. Here's what Neill has to say (bear in mind the original appears to have been published in 1960):
"One disconcerting feature in therapy is the constant undeclared war between the various schools. The Freudians for the most part dismissed Reich as a fake. a Kleinian won't see any truth in what an Adlerian says. They label themselves and when one labels oneself one ceases to grow. Today there is much wrangling among Reich's followers: 'We alone realize what the Master meant.' I am bragging when I say that, although I have been a disciple more than once in my life, I have managed to steer free of idolatry. My motto is: take from each what you want and reject the rest, and never label yourself as one of a school. I'd hate to think that long after I am dead teachers will call themselves Summerhillians. They will thus advertise the fact that they are dead.
"Coming back from the psychoanalytic atmosphere of Vienna in the early twenties I thought that analyzing was the answer to the problem child. I spent years analysing dreams of such children and was proud when a boy who had been chucked out of, say, Eton for stealing went out of Summerhill cured. It took me a long time to realize that Bill and Mary who had also been expelled for stealing but refused to come to me for analysis also went out cured; it was freedom to be themselves. A most satisfying realization, for, even if therapy were the answer, the millions of kids in the world cannot all have it."
I think they can have freedom to be who they are though. All it will take is for enough regular everyday people to demand that children finally receive the equal rights to which they are without question completely entitled.
I'd be interested to hear if you found Boorstin's The Discoverers any good or not, if the opportunity ever presents.
Steve
It also turns out that there's nothing about this Summerhill book that I don't like so far (at this point up to page 70 of 269). Neill makes clear his school's (and his own) limits and shortcomings. It would be almost impossible to point out the "good parts" because so far as I can tell the entire thing is outstanding. The one disappointment I can think of so far (bottom of p. 45) is that he said he "realized" that telling a mother who had been beating her three-year-old son how she was teaching him to hate life would be telling her something that "wouldn't sink in", so he did nothing, sounds like. But even that admission is out in the open, un-expertlike and I think therefore admirable.
A theme he has repeated maybe close to a half-dozen times by page 70 is that he had to finally stop crediting what he calls his "psychoanalysis" of certain problem kids with "curing" them, since the problem kids he hadn't personally treated became "cured" at an identical rate. He says over and over that it's freedom that does it. Freedom to be themselves and freedom from fear of authority.
But what made me think of you was our coincidental attempts at trying to calculate just how many trained mental health professionals it would take to change this lightbulb, if you remember that. Here's what Neill has to say (bear in mind the original appears to have been published in 1960):
"One disconcerting feature in therapy is the constant undeclared war between the various schools. The Freudians for the most part dismissed Reich as a fake. a Kleinian won't see any truth in what an Adlerian says. They label themselves and when one labels oneself one ceases to grow. Today there is much wrangling among Reich's followers: 'We alone realize what the Master meant.' I am bragging when I say that, although I have been a disciple more than once in my life, I have managed to steer free of idolatry. My motto is: take from each what you want and reject the rest, and never label yourself as one of a school. I'd hate to think that long after I am dead teachers will call themselves Summerhillians. They will thus advertise the fact that they are dead.
"Coming back from the psychoanalytic atmosphere of Vienna in the early twenties I thought that analyzing was the answer to the problem child. I spent years analysing dreams of such children and was proud when a boy who had been chucked out of, say, Eton for stealing went out of Summerhill cured. It took me a long time to realize that Bill and Mary who had also been expelled for stealing but refused to come to me for analysis also went out cured; it was freedom to be themselves. A most satisfying realization, for, even if therapy were the answer, the millions of kids in the world cannot all have it."
I think they can have freedom to be who they are though. All it will take is for enough regular everyday people to demand that children finally receive the equal rights to which they are without question completely entitled.
I'd be interested to hear if you found Boorstin's The Discoverers any good or not, if the opportunity ever presents.
Steve