- guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 March 2000 18.05 GMT
Being a pupil at Summerhill turned you into a kind of anthropologist's field study, such was the fascination with what A.S. Neill's free school was really like on the ground. Less exotic and sensational most of the time than the endless tabloids that visited and bribed boys and girls to bathe naked together or wrote stories about staff having sex on the front lawn (there wasn't one) believed.
My memories of the four years from age eleven that I spent at the ramshackle Victorian house with its overgrown grounds are a mix of camping in the big field on summer nights, sitting around in the long grass discussing pubescent feelings with friends and never worrying a member of staff would shoo you off to do something more purposeful.
In fact they often came and joined in. There was time pottering in the art room or going to the wonderful sewing groups held by Ulla, who took a great pride in getting us making our own clothes while lecturing us on the perils of bathing too often. Then there were the hours of what Philip Larkin called "forgotten boredom" - time when the freedom to do what you wanted seemed like an imposition. How I longed for compulsory activities on those occasions, although with hindsight I can see how much thinking and flowing of the imagination took place.
The freedom to choose whether or not to go to lessons was central to Neill's philosophy and he seemed at times to sabotage the possibility of learning too much even if we did go. I recall being in his English class while preparing for O levels and him complaining that the set text, The Autobiography of a Supertramp, was "awful rubbish".
Nor was he always very good at picking teachers - they would be selected for great personality and love of kids rather than pedagogic skill rather too often. But perhaps that was part of the grand plan: it had those of us - most in fact - who wanted to get a decent education feeling like omnivores put on to a macrobiotic diet. We emerged from Summerhill desperate for more.
What we did learn a lot about was democracy. Sitting around the large wooden hall for the weekly school meeting we discussed proposed new rules, and catapulted those we didn't like with a one person one vote system. We tried and punished pupils and staff who transgressed - and that included Neill, who sat like a giant garden gnome, watching and smiling his narrow, sardonic smile.
But did it succeed as a school? Depends what you mean by success. I didn't get the kind of academic grounding I'd have liked, but I chose to continue studying and got into my desired profession. I emerged with a great sense of the world being on my side, and Summerhill with its freedom philosophy was the model for the primary school I chose for my own children - who are now both at university.
