Leaving Summerhill
What happened to the children of Summerhill after they left – a school, where no pupil has ever been required to attend a lesson?
A. S. Neill, the founder of Summerhill School was the doyen of the alternative educational movement. From its beginnings in prewar Germany through to the present, no pupil at Summerhill has ever been required to attend a lesson.
Hussein Lucas spent 10 years researching this highly original and fascinating study, where he traces, through interviews, what happened to the pupils of Britain's most controversial school, from its origins in 1929 through to the present. What emerges is a series of portraits of surprisingly different people, whose common ground was an education and childhood in the absence of fear. The interviews also reveal what the school was like at different periods of its history, and how it changed in the face of new challenges and forces.
