Aftert Summerhill

What Happened to the Pupils of Britain’s Most Radical School?

by Hussein Lucas

ISBN: 978-1-84289-052-3
£9.95
Paperback 216 x 138mm
224 pages plus 4 pages of colour photographs

Buy online at http://www.herbertadler.co.uk/aftersummerhill.html after 26th July 2011

One of the big questions surrounding a radical educational establishment like Summerhill is whether parents might be limiting their children’s prospects by sending them to a school where the child is not forced to learn.

Founded by the legendary educator AS Neill in 1921, Summerhill is notable for the fact that it does not require any of its pupils to attend lessons. Furthermore, the school is run by a council of pupils, teachers and houseparents, where questions of discipline are decided democratically. What, one may ask, is the likely outcome of sending a child to such a school?

In After Summerhill, Hussein Lucas investigates these and other questions in a series of extended interviews with people who were educated at Summerhill throughout its history.

The former pupils who emerged from this radical experiment talk about how they coped after they left the idyllic environment of Summerhill and went on to face the harsh realities of the world at large, and how their experience of the school affected their lives subsequently.

After Summerhill is also, in part, an oral history of the school told by those who were there: a vivid and illuminating picture of what it was like to be a member of this remarkable educational community.

It also reveals how throughout its 90 years, Summerhill has undergone a number of changes, yet never lost its basic ideals.

Most of all, this is a book that deals with the actual outcomes of an approach to learning and education that seems to fly in the face of accepted wisdom.

Well-known Subud member, Leonard Lassalle, is one of the people interviewed in the book.