Alexander Sutherland Neill

“ The only discipline I ask for usually is the discipline that interest draws. If a boy whets his pencil while I am describing the events that led to the Great Rebellion, I sidetrack him on the topic of rabbits ... and I generally make him sit up. I know that I am teaching badly if the class is loafing, and I am honest enough in my saner moments not to blame the bairns.
I do not like strict discipline, for I do believe that a child should have as much freedom as possible. I want a bairn to be human, and I try to be human myself. ”

“ I used to be the most uncharitable of mortals, but now I seldom judge a man or woman. Peter MacMannish gets drunk; I do not condemn him, for I have looked on the wine when it was red. Mary MacWinnie has had two illegitimate children; I am a theoretical Don Juan. Shepherd, the rabbit-catcher, has an atrocious temper; I do not judge him, because, although my own temper is pretty equable, I can realise that the man can no more help his temper than I can the size of my feet. Charity comes to you when you have discovered how weak you are, and that's what kept me from being a good code teacher. ”

“ Discipline thwarts the boy at every turn, and our adult authority is fatally injuring the boy's character. Our task is to provide the child with opportunity to wield his power. We suppress it and the lad shows his power in destructive instead of constructive activities. I find that I keep returning to this subject of suppression, but it is the most important evil in education. It does not matter how perfect a teacher makes his instruction in arithmetic; if he has not come to see that suppression of a child is a tragedy, his instruction is of no value. ”

“ Every human being has something of the gruesome in his composition; the murder cases are the most popular readings in our press. I want to direct this innate desire for gruesome things to the realising of the most gruesome things in the world—the grinding of soul and body in order to gain profits, the misery of poverty and cold, the weariness of toil. If our press really wants to make its readers shudder, why does it not publish long accounts of infant mortality in the slums, of gin fed bairns, of back-doors used as fuel, of phthisical girls straining their eyes over seams? ”

“ I have half a mind to leave you for a year, Margaret, just to give you a chance of writing about yourself. I won't be able to write to you in the same strain: I wrote myself out when I fell in love at twenty-two. You can only be a good letter-writer once, and that is when you are discovering yourself for the first time, and ramming it down on paper as fast as you can. I used to write letters of twenty foolscap pages, but now I never write a letter if I can help it. Life has lost most of its glamour when you realise that you have discovered yourself. ”

“ Both come from the world of make-believe, the world of phantasy. Their arrival in England simply made a dream come true.
Now I am certain that if any individual in the great Piccadilly crowd had met Douglas and Mary on the boat, he or she would have looked at them with interest, but there would have been no cheering and throwing of roses. What the crowd does is to raise an emotion to a superlative degree. In a full hall you will laugh at a joke that would not bring a smile to your face in a room. You become absorbed in your crowd, and you are fully open to your crowd's suggestion. ”

“ When I think of style I am forced to recollect the stylists I had to read at the university. There was Sir Thomas Browne and his Urn Burial. What the devil is the use of people like Browne I don't know. He gives us word music and imagery I admit, but I don't want word music and imagery from prose, I want ideas or a story. I can't think of one idea I got from Browne or Fisher or Ruskin, or any of the stylists, yet I have found many ideas in translations of Nietzsche and Ibsen. Style is the curse of English literature. ”

“ Since the beginning of humanity children have been warped by the attitudinising of their elders. A child is imitative always; he hasn't the power to think out biggish things for himself. He is tremendously docile; he will believe almost anything you tell him, and he will accept an older person's pose without question. If one of the village boys were to see Macdonald stotting home drunk he would be like the countryman who, when he saw a giraffe for the first time, cried: 'Hell!... I don't believe it!' And the sad thing is that they never are able to distinguish between pose and truth. ”

“ The class-teaching system has many faults, and O'Neill seems to have abolished spoon-feeding, but the class has one merit—it is a crowd. Each child measures himself against the others, not necessarily in competition. Perhaps it is the psychological effect of having an audience that I am trying to praise. Yes, that is it: the individual-work way is like a rehearsal of a play to empty seats; the class-way is like a performance before a crowded house. It is a projection of one's ego outward. ”

“ There is no reward and no punishment, no marks, no competition. A child looks on each task as a work of art, and his one desire is to please himself rather than please his teacher. The tone of the school is excellent; the pupils are frankly critical and delightfully self-possessed. And since parents choose this school voluntarily I presume that the education we call home-life is ideal. How easy it must be for John Russell! If my Dickie had been going home each night to a father and mother who were as eager for truth and freedom as I was, I don't think that Dickie would have cut me to-night. ”

“ I want to substitute kindness for the word chivalry. I want to tell my bairns that the only sin in the world is cruelty. I do not preach morality for I hardly know what morality is. I have no morals, I am an a-moralist, or should it be a non-moralist? I judge not, and I mean to school my bairns into judging not. Yet I am not being quite consistent. I do judge cruelty and uncharitableness; but I judge not those who do not act up to the accustomed code of morals. A code is always a temptation to a healthy person ”

“ So in squashing Tom's rebellion he is unconsciously squashing the rebellion in his own soul. Tom's rebellion could not affect me because I have got rid of my father complex, and his rebellion would touch nothing in me.
Authority will be long in dying, for too many people cling to it as a prop. Most people like to have their minds made up for them; it is so easy to obey orders, and so difficult to live your own life carrying your own burden and finding your own path. ”

“ At present our schools provide for the average child ... and [Pg 19] heaven only knows how many geniuses have been destroyed by stupid coercion. I want education to set out deliberately to catch genius in the bud. And what discovers genius cannot be bad for the children who have no genius.
I want education to produce the best that is in a child. That is the only way to improve the world. The naked truth is that we grown-ups have failed to make the world better than the gigantic slum it is, and when we pretend to know how a child should be brought up we are being merely fatuous. ”

“ The Scotch Education Department is iniquitous because it is a department; a department cannot have a sense of humour. And it is humour that makes a man decent and kind and human.
If the Scotch Education Department were to die suddenly I should suddenly become a worse disciplinarian than I am now. If Willie did not like Woodwork, I should say to him: "All right, Willie. Go and do what you do like, but take my advice and do some work; you will enjoy your football all the better for it."
I believe in discipline, but it is self-discipline that I believe in. ”

“ If Shakespeare had not had an unconscious hatred of his father, Hamlet would never have been written. In other words, if Bacon had discovered the psychology of the unconscious, Shakespeare might have been analysed and forthwith might have gone in for keeping bees instead of writing plays.
It is the neurotic who leads the world; he is a rebel and he is an idealist. Yet when you analyse him you find what a poor devil he is. His noble crusade against vivisection is due to the abnormal strain of cruelty he is repressing in himself ”

“ The navy deserves all the respect we can give it. But, Macdonald, in your position I should give a further lesson on patriotism; I should point out to these bairns that while the glorious navy is defending our shores from a foreign enemy the enemy within is plundering the nation. I should tell them that under the protection of the navy the profiteers are raising the prices of necessaries hand over fist. All the patriotic flag-waving in the world won't help these bairns to understand that the patriotism of the masses is being exploited by the self-seeking of the dirty few. ”

“ His ideal, so far as I can make out, is to have an aristocracy that behaves kindly and charitably to a deserving working-class—which, after all, is Nietzsche's ideal.
I believe in few of these things. I detest charity of that kind; I hate the type of youth that our Public Schools and Oxfords turn out. I want to see the land belong to the people, I want to see every unit of the State working for the delight that work, as opposed to toil, can bring. The aristocracy has merits that I appreciate. Along with the poor they cheerfully die for their country ... ”

“ The Douglas-Mary episode makes me pessimistic about the future of democracy. For democracy is crowd rule, and the crowd is a baby when it isn't a savage. Yet we have no real democracy in this country. We have a slave state, the exploiters and the exploited, the "haves" and the "have nots." Douglas and Mary came over, and the poor beauty-starved populace forgot for the moment its poverty, and showered all its pent-up emotion on the people from picture-book land. ”

“ I think it cruel to make a bairn bank the penny it gets for running a message. Spending is always a pleasant thing, but a bairn gets more delirious joy out of buying a hapenny lucky-bag than an adult gets out of buying a thousand guinea Rolls Royce motor.
Some parents are foolish enough to give their bairns too much to spend. Little Mary Wallace has a penny every day of the year. I think that foolish of her mother. Spending must be a very rare thing if it is to yield the highest pleasure. ”

“ I said, "I wouldn't force anyone to stay at school, but to-day boys quite as stupid naturally as Smith stay at the university and love it. A few years' rubbing shoulders with other men is bound to make a man more alert. Take away, as you have done for argument's sake, the necessity of a boy's leaving school at fourteen to earn a living and you simply make every school a university."
"And it isn't three weeks since I heard you curse universities!" said Lawson with a grin. ”