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Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing is a book about the English boarding school Summerhill School by its headmaster A. S. Neill. It is known for introducing his ideas to the American public. It was published in America on November 7, 1960, by the Hart Publishing Company and later revised as Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood in 1993. Its contents are a repackaged collection from four of Neill's previous works. The foreword was written by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who distinguished between authoritarian coercion and Summerhill.
The seven chapters of the book cover the origins and implementation of the school, and other topics in childrearing. Summerhill, founded in the 1920s, is run as a children's democracy under Neill's educational philosophy of self-regulation, where kids choose whether to go to lessons and how they want to live freely without imposing on others. The school makes its rules at a weekly schoolwide meeting where students and teachers each have one vote alike. Neill discarded other pedagogies for one of the innate goodness of the child.
Despite selling no advance copies in America, Summerhill brought Neill significant renown in the next decade, wherein he sold three million copies. The book was used in hundreds of college courses and translated into languages such as German. Reviewers noted Neill's charismatic personality, but doubted the project's general replicability elsewhere and its overstated generalizations. They put Neill in a lineage of experimental thought, but questioned his lasting contribution to psychology. The book begat an American Summerhillian following, cornered an education criticism market, and made Neill into a folk leader.
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Previews available in: English French German
Subjects
Child development, Child psychology, Child rearing, Education, Summerhill School, Learning, Child, Boarding schools, Alternative education, Free schools, Open plan schools, Antiautoritäre Erziehung, Leiston : Summerhill School, Lerntheorie, Philosophy, Infant, Scholen, OpvoedingPlaces
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Summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing
1977, Pocket Books, Hart Pub. Co.
in English
0671790013 9780671790011
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Theorie und Praxis der antiautoritären Erziehung: Das Beispiel Summerhill
1970-06, Rowohlt Verlag
Paperback
in German
- 276.-325. Tausend Juni 1970
3499167077 9783499167072
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Book Details
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Traduction de A radical approach to child rearing.
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- Created November 1, 2008
- 6 revisions
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May 6, 2025 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
December 10, 2021 | Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten | Merge works |
August 18, 2010 | Edited by IdentifierBot | added LibraryThing ID |
April 16, 2010 | Edited by bgimpertBot | Added goodreads ID. |
November 1, 2008 | Created by ImportBot | Imported from The Laurentian Library MARC record |