Publisher's Synopsis
'Freedom is the bee in my tartan bonnet,' Neill once wrote. Love, it could be added, is the flower his bee fed upon. That his school, based on love and freedom, has survived for fifty years is remarkable, but it has done more than merely survive. It has, the author of this book maintains, demonstrated the viability of an alternative form of education peculiarly appropriate to the Free Society which may now be emerging. But Neill's work has to be evaluated in its own context before it can be applied with understanding in another. This volume sets out to trace the development of Summerhill and of Neill's ideas in relation to the social and political events of this half-century, as well as in the context of the related ideas of such men and women as Homer Lane and Wilhelm Reich, Edmond Holmes and Fred Clarke, Montessori and Susan Isaacs, Bertrand Russell and Marcuse.
