Education

1 October 2011Review

Herbert Adler Publishing, 2011; 224pp; £9.95

This book consists of fifteen articles compiled some years ago from interviews with former pupils of AS Neill’s radical educational establishment, Summerhill. The interviewees have between them a huge range of careers, made wider than it might have been by the fact that many individuals changed direction several times. Leonard Lasalle, for instance, gave up working in advertising because it seemed to him to be immoral and ended up as a dealer in antiques.

The contributors are honest…

1 September 2011Letter

The feature on Summerhill in your July/August edition contained a reference to “a scurrilous film” transmitted by Channel 4 in 1996. Actually it was 1992. It was called Summerhill at Seventy, and was shot and directed by a man-and-wife team whose six-year-old attended the school throughout the filming. I was the editor.

Was it a scurrilous film? Possibly. Certainly it provided the worst experience of my 40-year career in documentary: worst, that is, in terms of the imposition of a…

1 September 2011News

Cuts and compulsory redundancies to end.

Students at the University of Glasgow are celebrating after the university’s principal Anton Muscatelli conceded defeat, so ending the longest student occupation in UK history. Hard-won concessions include a new postgraduate club, no further cuts to courses and no compulsory redundancies at the university. As part of the deal, students will be able to question the principal in a mass open meeting in October as there has been a perceived lack of transparency surrounding management decisions…

13 August 2011Feature

In this examination of their work providing nonviolence training for teachers and pupils in the German state education system, Andreas Peters and Milan ask whether they are taking part in a great opportunity to encourage social change, or merely providing a fig-leaf for a totalitarian institution engaged in supplying resources to economic interests?

First act

7:45 at a school in Germany. A group of pupils stand outside the door of a school building. One of them needs to get into the building urgently: He needs to use the toilet.

Just then, two trainers from the Trainingskollektiv Kölner (Cologne Training Collective ) approach the door, which is being guarded by a caretaker. Over the next two days they will carry out de-escalation training with a fifth form class. The two trainers reach the entrance hall of the school after…

13 August 2011Feature

In the city of Medellín youth activists are taking a stand for peace within their highly militarised communities. Adriana Castaño from the Red Juvenil - Youth Network - reports.

Medellín is a city of contrasts, where you find many ways of life. But in parallel, in different neighbourhoods, people live and wage a war that, besides death and prolonged absences, leaves an odd feeling of normality - as if, here, nothing will happen. But it does happen, and increasingly proposals that people should arm themselves to defend life and institutional normality gain strength, proposals that divide the world between goodies and baddies.

Youths tend to see themselves in…

13 August 2011Feature

PN interviews the chair of an empowering arts organisation

Mark Faulkner, coming to the end of two years chairing Room 13 Lochyside, described how the organisation had opened up “a whole new world” to him, making him realise that art was not about painting landscapes, but about “painting a brain on a piece of paper”.

Mark, 12, went on: “My own pieces are quite cryptic. I quite like it when instead of just walking past a piece, you have to look at it for about 30 minutes. And there’d be no piece of writing next to it, because that would be the…

13 August 2011Feature

“If you truly want to determine Britain's state of affairs, you should look to its young people.” Gordon Brown has often expressed this idea. It is time he followed his own advice. The young people of Britain want nothing to do with his policies of war.

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq thousands of school students across Britain walked out of their schools and colleges. The spirit, defiance and sheer vibrancy of this mass action helped energise the anti-war movement.

1 July 2011Feature

Summerhill is 90 this August. Through most of a century the world has been inspired or terrified by AS Neill’s philosophy of education and his championing of children’s liberty. Peace News celebrates the birthday of a great libertarian project.

The pupil: Hylda Sims

At a time when the term “free school” is bandied about without a hint of irony by the Government as they “improve standards”, it is a wonderful thing to know that Summerhill, perhaps the freest school in the world, is alive and well and about to celebrate its ninetieth birthday.

Being sent there, as I was, towards the end of the Second World War – those dark days of cane, slipper and other ritual forms of child abuse – was about the best piece of luck a…

1 July 2011Comment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 April 2011News

I met Karen and Alice at the Heatherington Recreation Club student occupation at Glasgow University. They and numerous others are occupying and looking after a beautiful building, a former club for research students that had been left to waste by the university authorities.

Heatherington is now being used as an educational and cultural venue as well as a space from which to organise on issues in higher education and the wider anti-cuts agenda. Scotland’s academics took two days…

1 April 2011Review

PM Press, 2010, 176pp, £13.99

In the final sentence of her book Judith Suissa sums up what she has attempted to do. This was to establish that however doubtful the feasibility of anarchist society may be, exploring anarchism is “an educationally valuable and constructive project”. The exercise involved prolonged comparison of anarchist and liberal views. Both anarchists and liberals, she says, adhere to the view that humans have an inherent capacity for goodness. The difference is that anarchists believe that before you…

2 March 2011Blog

<p>Should ex-soldiers be enlisted as teachers?</p>

I have just read that Lordswood School in Birmingham employs ex-soldiers as teachers and runs a cadet-force to which a fifth of the pupils belong. They wear uniforms and they are taught to shoot.

Michael Gove believes this is the right way to tackle disorder in the classroom. He says, ‘The presence of role models who have the sort of experience in taking young people and forging them into a cohesive team and instilling discipline; I think that will be immensely valuable.’ (Quoted in…

1 February 2011News

A look at cuts protests in Wales

So far, this winter of discontent has seen some really positive actions in Aberystwyth. On 24 November last year, students from Aberystwyth University “took education into their own hands”, setting up a Free University in the town square. Joining with lecturers and people from schools and the wider community, the Free University action organised by Aber Students Against The Cuts (a Facebook group) opposed spending cuts in education, increases in tuition fees, and the restructuring of higher…

1 February 2011Review

Maclehouse Press, 2010; 274 pages; £16.99, hbk

Daniel Pennac, who is a well-known writer in France, was a total failure at school up to the age of fourteen. In the first part of this book he describes his despair, both in vivid anecdotes and general comment. “My God,” he says at one point, “the loneliness of the dunce, ashamed of never being able to do what you are supposed to be doing.” He became an insolent class clown, a vandal and a thief.

His insolence was to some extent justified by the mockery of some of his teachers, but…

1 July 2010Feature

This month Peace News is publishing David Gribble’s book on moral development and decline. Here is an extract.

It is obvious that our physical skills decline with age, and although it is an unpopular idea, there is incontrovertible evidence that our intellects also begin to become less alert, flexible and reliable after the age of about twenty-five. Although there is no reason to suppose that our moral sensitivity should be exempt from this general decline, the notion that children might be morally superior to their elders arouses an indignation that is sometimes close to fury.

Memories…