Alexander Sutherland Neill

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Poor lad! Between Macdonald and a mother like that he will live hardly. Each will break his will; each will insist on perfect obedience to arbitrary orders. I am honestly amazed at the small success I had with Jim. He was leaving my free school every night to go home to an atmosphere of anger and brutal stupidity. Now he is leaving his poor home every morning to go to the prison of Macdonald. No wonder the lad is lapsing. In a few years he will be a typical villager; he will stand at the brig of an evening and make caustic comments on the passers-by; he will sneer at everything and everybody. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What's wrong with you southerners is that you always think in classes; your tipping isn't kindness; you tip to save your self-respect; you are afraid that any man of the lower orders should think you mean. The Scot is not as a rule hampered by class distinctions, and he often refuses to tip because he hates to insult a man. You Londoners put it down to meanness, but I would have felt myself the meanest of low cads if I had tipped that ploughboy. Scotland is comparatively free from the rotten tipping habit. ”

“ How the devil are bairns to gain any perspective in life if a fool like Macdonald spends half a day investigating nothing? Education should aim at giving a child a philosophy, and philosophy simply means the contemplation of the important things in life. If teachers emphasise the importance of things like silence and manners and dignity and respect, we cannot expect our children to rise higher in later years than the cheap gossipy lying press and the absurd system we call party politics. ”

“ I believe it, Margaret. My whole theory of education is built on my abject humility. My chief objection to Macdonald is that he ignores his own weaknesses. He has never analysed himself to see what manner of man he is. If he could look into his heart and discover all the little meanesses and follies and hypocrisies he would not have the courage to make a boy salute him ”

“ They live a life that is one continuous lie."
"I don't understand that," said Margaret with a puzzled look.
"A mother lies to her child when she tells it that it is wicked when it makes a noise; a father lies to his son when he tells him that he will come to a bad end if he smokes any more cigarettes. Worse than that they lie by negation. ”

“ Children live for the hour; their griefs are as ephemeral as their joys, and the ephemeralism of their emotion is as wonderful as its intensity. A [Pg 14] boy will bury his brother in the afternoon, and scream at Charlie Chaplin in the evening. He will forget Charlie again, though, when he lies alone in the big double bed at night.
Jim and Janet and Jean and the rest have loved me well, but I have no illusions about their love. Children are painfully docile. In two weeks they will accept Macdonald's iron rule without question, just as they accepted my absence of rule without question. ”

“ The self-discipline necessary to enable a village boy to buy a water-pistol will do him infinitely more good than all the discipline of all the Macdonalds in Scotland. I would have all children poor in money, but I would give them the opportunity of earning enough money to buy their toys. A little poverty is good for anybody; I would recommend a young man to live on twelve shillings a week for a year or two; he would begin to see things in proportion.
A friend of mine bases his antipathy to Socialism on this view of poverty. He argues that poverty brings out self-reliance, pluck, grit. ”

“ Freedom allows a child to develop its own personality. If Jim Jackson, after being with me for two years, goes into an office and shirks all unpleasant duties, I hold that Jim is naturally devoid of grit. I allowed him to develop his own personality and if he fails in life his personality is manifestly weak. If Macdonald can turn out a better worker than I can ... ”

“ I see now that our education is founded on the unpleasant fact that property is more sacred than life. Teachers are encouraged to make their pupils patriotic; every boy must be brought up in the belief that it is great and glorious to die for one's country. A real patriotism would lead a boy to realise that it is a great and glorious thing to live for one's country ”

“ Macdonald looked triumphant. "In other words you forgot your principles and punished?"
"Human nature is weak," I said sadly. "If I saw a boy sticking a pen-knife into the tyre of my bicycle I should kick him ... kick him hard and then kick him again. There is such a thing as elemental rage in every man—even Christ used a whip in the temple. There are times when you cannot reason: you act impulsively. ”

“ They have nothing to learn. They know all the facts about curriculum subjects; they know exactly what is right and what is wrong; they know that their authority is infallible; they know that swearing is bad, that cap-lifting is good; they know that obedience is a great virtue, that disobedience to their authority is an unforgivable sin. They are the Supermen of education; their attitude to the school is exactly the attitude of Charles I. to his Parliament. They believe in the Divine Right of Dominies. The dominie can do no wrong. Macdonald's bairns consider him something beyond a human being ”

“ The world is full of pain and terror; the great law of nature is: Eat or be eaten. I realised for the first time that every hedgerow is a horrid den of suffering and fear. Cruelty is Nature's name, Margaret. ”

“ The New Education has commenced; its first act was to abolish freedom. Free speech is dead; a free press is merely a name; the workers were wheedled into giving up their freedom to sell their commodity labour to the highest bidder, while the profiteer retains his right to sell his goods at the highest price he can get. Every restriction on liberty is alleged to be necessary to win the war.
The alarming feature of the present Prussianisation of Britain lies in the circumstance that the signing of peace will be but the beginning of a new war. ”

“ No coward will face the scorn of women and the contempt of men as these men do. Think of the life that lies in front of a Conscientious Objector. Nobody will ever understand him; he will be an outcast for ever. Dear, it takes stupendous courage to put yourself in that position, and I can't think that any man could do it unless he were following principles that were dearer to him than the judgment of his fellow men. You see, Margaret, ordinary courage and moral courage are totally different things. ”

“ If you make them salute you I see no logical reason why you shouldn't carry respect to its extreme and force them to kneel down and kiss your boots. If you insist on perfect truthfulness why do you try to hide the truth about the sex of pigeons? You pretend to be a believer in perfect obedience to authority, and yet I saw you ride a bicycle without a light the other night. I am quite willing to prove that every man is inconsistent. ”

“ I once had a discussion with Macdonald on Socialism. He accused me of attempting to force humanity to be of a pattern.
"Socialism kills individualism," he said.
I smile to think that the Conservative Macdonald is trying to mould children to a pattern, while I, a Socialist, insist on each child's being allowed to develop its own separate individuality.
The Socialist would appear to be the keenest individualist in the world, for it is from the heretical section of society that the demand for freedom in education is coming. ”

“ I said, "and you have State capitalism. You won't abolish wages; you'll buy the mines and railways, and you'll draw your wages from what is left over after the interest due to the late shareholders is paid."
"Ah!" he interrupted, "you want to confiscate?"
"If necessary, certainly. We have conscripted life because the State required men to give their lives; why not conscript wealth in the same way? The State requires the wealth of the rich, not only for the purpose of paying for the war; it requires it to pay for the peace to come."
"Control of industry by producers has always failed," he said. ”

“ The making of my ego was a thing outside my direction altogether. To reward me in an after life for being a religious man is as unfair as to punish me for being a thief. We don't award a gold medal to an actress for being beautiful; we don't offer Shaw a peerage because he is Christlike enough to hate killing animals for sport. Shaw can no more help being humanitarian than Gladys Cooper can help being bonny. Down in the school there Ellen Smith can no more help being the best arithmetician than Dave Ramsay can help being the biggest coward. ”

“ I would abolish fear and punishment."
"And do you mean to tell me," he demanded, "that a boy will offer to learn his history and geography and arithmetic and grammar of his own free will?"
"It depends on the boy. Here, again, we come up against the wisdom of the ages. The wisdom of the ages has decreed that these subjects are the chief things in education. But are they? I should imagine that it is more important for a boy to know something about feminine psychology than about Henry the Eighth. He will one day be called on to choose a wife, but he'll never be called on to choose a king. ”

“ Circumlocution is a Victorian nuisance. Any man who has anything to say says it simply and without trappings. And, mind you, Macdonald, people who use circumlocution in style use it in thought. The average man loves flowery literature, and he loves flowery thoughts. The contest between the plain style and the aureate style is really the old contest between realism and romance. The romantic way to look at crime is to fix your attention on drink and penny dreadfuls and cinema shows ”

“ A thinker is as much a freak as a man born with two heads. And that's why I say that thinkers are unhealthy. Blake the great poet was mad; Ibsen the great Norwegian dramatist [Pg 172] died in the mad-house; Shelley was diseased; Milton was blind, Keats a consumptive; nearly every great composer of music who ever lived was mad."
"But," laughed Margaret, "you said that education was thinking, and now you say that thinkers are all mad."
"Yes, but madness is what the world needs. All these villagers down there are absolutely sane, but the world won't be a scrap the better for their existence. ”