Join BookitisSave favorites, build lists, and follow creators.

Summerhill

A Radical Approach to Child Rearing

Bookitis Pick
Cover for Summerhill
S
Image source: Open Library
a. s. neillA. S. NeillAlexander S. NeillAleksander JakopičFirst published 19983 editions

**Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing** is a book about the English boarding school Summerhill School by its headmaster A. S. Neill. It is known for introducing his ideas to the American public. It was published in America on November 7, 1960, by the Hart Publishing Company and later revised as **Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood** in 1993. Its contents are a repackaged collection from four of Neill's previous works. The foreword was written by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who distinguished between authoritarian coercion and Summerhill. The seven chapters of the book cover the origins and implementation of the school, and other topics in childrearing. Summerhill, founded in the 1920s, is run as a children's democracy under Neill's educational philosophy of self-regulation, where kids choose whether to go to lessons and how they want to live freely without imposing on others. The school makes its rules at a weekly schoolwide meeting where students and teachers each have one vote alike. Neill discarded other pedagogies for one of the innate goodness of the child. Despite selling no advance copies in America, *Summerhill* brought Neill significant renown in the next decade, wherein he sold three million copies. The book was used in hundreds of college courses and translated into languages such as German. Reviewers noted Neill's charismatic personality, but doubted the project's general replicability elsewhere and its overstated generalizations. They put Neill in a lineage of experimental thought, but questioned his lasting contribution to psychology. The book begat an American Summerhillian following, cornered an education criticism market, and made Neill into a folk leader.

Overview

Shared work-level identity and catalog context.

First publish date January 1, 19984 credited authorsSearch language english

Bookitis keeps work pages focused on the shared book identity and the editions that actually belong to it. Unrelated books should not appear here as primary content.

Contributors

People credited with this work in the active catalog.

  • a. s. neill

    Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog

    Open Author
  • A. S. Neill

    Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog

    Open Author
  • Alexander S. Neill

    Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog

    Open Author
  • Aleksander Jakopič

    Author profile in the active Bookitis catalog

    Open Author

Editions

Publication-specific versions linked to this work only.