SUMMERHILL: OLD LEFT NOW INCORRECT

Amusing how yesterday's Leftist "wisdom" eventually gets recognized as bunk. It doesn't say much for today's Leftist "wisdom", however

"The dictum that a pupil who plays with his pencil has a repressed urge to masturbate was just one of the pronouncements made by the late A.S. Neill in Summerhill , the landmark book written by the founder of Britain's most famous progressive school. Controversial and provocative, Neill's explanation of Summerhill's pioneering philosophies is still widely regarded as a bible of liberal education, yet now the book is to be republished with most of its author's words excised. In a decision that has led former pupils to fear for the very survival of the school, the words of one of Britain's most radical educationists are to be bowdlerised in an attempt to make the ethos of Summerhill more palatable to today's parents.

'There is a danger that the school will not survive any softening of Neill's passion and philosophies,' said Nathalie Gensac, a television documentary maker who attended Summerhill from 1976 to 1982. 'Without his beliefs, Summerhill will become like any other ordinary school, and that would be a tragedy.' In the original text, first published in 1962 but now out of print, Neill explained his reasons for creating the independent school that became as famous for allowing its pupils to skip lessons as for the habit of staff and students to sunbathe nude. The new edition, however, will cut Neill's arguments in half, replacing them with a short introduction by Zoe Readhead, principal of Summerhill since 1985 and Neill's daughter.

Neill's beliefs were founded firmly on Freud. In one of the sections that is to be cut, he wrote that 'Summerhill has not turned out a single homosexual... because Summerhill children do not suffer from a guilt complex about masturbation'.

Readhead, however, who successfully appealed against a notice of complaint issued in 2000 by David Blunkett, then Education Secretary, after an Ofsted inspection team found that the school was failing to maintain proper standards, has defended her decision. 'I don't want to be offensive to Neill but he wrote the book in a different time,' she said. 'Perhaps his arguments need to be subtler now.'

Mark Vaughan, a former Summerhill student who co-edited the new book, was the last journalist to interview Neill just months before his death in 1972. 'This is not a question of censoring or editing,' Vaughan said. 'It is not that we went through the original book and took out the bits we didn't like. But Summerhill is a book of the past and it is a credit to Neill that anything he wrote so long ago is still so relevant that it can be reprinted next year'. [I couldn't have put it better myself]

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BRITISH EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS EBB AWAY

Learning foreign languages has slumped since the Government allowed secondary schools to make them optional for students over 14, according to a study released yesterday. Three quarters of comprehensives no longer require pupils to take a language at GCSE. Of these, 72 per cent report a decline in the numbers studying French and 70 per cent in German. Only Spanish bucked the trend, with 44 per cent of schools noting an increase in take-up and 44 per cent reporting a decline.

Schools in the poorest areas were the most likely to let children drop foreign languages, according to the survey of 807 secondary schools carried out by Cilt, the National Centre for Languages. Eighty-two per cent of comprehensives in working class areas reported that languages had been made optional after 14, compared with 62 per cent of those in better-off communities. Overall, 85 per cent of schools in which languages were no longer compulsory said that there had been a decline in the numbers of children taking them....

Two thirds of schools used exchange trips and talks to underline the importance of learning languages. Only 7 per cent of grammar schools had made languages optional.

Although 61 per cent of schools in the South had made the subject optional, the figures were 71 per cent in the Midlands and 77 per cent in the North. Among schools that had continued to make languages compulsory, 48 per cent said thjat languages provided children with useful social and employment skills. A third said it was because they achieved good exam results, and a quarter said it was important to give children a broad curriculum.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

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