Summerhill (book)

Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing is a 1960 book by A. S. Neill, headmaster of the English boarding school Summerhill, that introduced his educational ideas to an American audience, drawing together material from four of his earlier works with a foreword by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm distinguishing authoritarian coercion from the Summerhill approach. Its seven chapters describe the school's origins and operation, run since the 1920s as a children's democracy under Neill's philosophy of self-regulation, in which students choose whether to attend lessons and the school's rules are set at a weekly meeting where students and teachers each hold one vote. The book sold no advance copies in America but went on to sell three million copies, was used in hundreds of college courses, and made Neill a prominent figure in education criticism, though reviewers questioned how replicable the school's approach really was elsewhere. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/