A. S. Neill - Summerhill (1960)

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Often... girls... who never go to lessons... spend much time with needlework, and some, later in life, take up dressmaking and designing. It is an absurd curriculum that makes a prospective dressmaker study quadratic equations or Boyle's Law.

A. S. Neill

My own criterion of success is the ability to work joyfully and to live positively.

A. S. Neill

The function of the child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he should live.

A. S. Neill

A child is innately wise and realistic. If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.

A. S. Neill

No one has the right to make a boy learn Latin, because learning is a matter for individual choice; but if in a Latin class, a boy fools all the time, the class should throw him out, because he interferes with the freedom of others.

A. S. Neill

You cannot make children learn music or anything else without to some degree converting them into will-less adults. You fashion them into accepters of the status quo – a good thing for a society that needs obedient sitters at dreary desks, standers in shops, mechanical catchers of the 8:30 suburban train – a society, in short, that is carried on the shabby shoulders of the scared little man – the scared-to-death conformist.

A. S. Neill