Education

During the student fees protest in December 2010, police tipped Jody McIntyre out of his wheelchair and dragged him across the road. A metropolitan police internal enquiry in May found that this had been done “for his own safety”. However, in a report published in late August, the independent police complaints commission (IPCC) ruled that the officer concerned had used excessive force and should be charged with common assault. This charge could no longer be brought as a six-month legal…

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…

On 17 September, students began an occupation of Edinburgh University’s George Square lecture theatre that lasted 36 hours. A hundred students were involved in the occupation, which followed the university’s announcement that tuition fees would be raised to £9,000 per annum for UK students from outwith Scotland, with Scottish students remaining exempt under Scottish law.

Standard Scottish degrees consist of four-year courses, taking the fee total to as much as £36,000. Students asked…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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.

…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…