#28 Autumn 1999 $4.95 The EDUCATION REVOLUTION MAGAZINE Formerly AERO-gramme With special CHANGING SCHOOLS section The Magazine of the Alternative Education Resource Organization 417 Roslyn Rd., Roslyn Heights, NY 11577 ISSN # 10679219 phone: 516-621-2195 or 800-769-4171 fax: 516-625-3257 e-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://www.edrev.org THE IDEC AT SUMMERHILL The 7th Annual International Democratic Education Conference was held at Summerhill School in Leiston, England from July 23-26. I arrived a week early, before the term was over, so I could visit the school while the students were still there. On the last leg of the journey Mrs. Gull, the taxi driver, drove us from the Saxmundham train station to the school. She said that she and her husband would be glad to testify any time about the wonderful changes they had seen in the students as they drove them periodically to the train and airport. She was quite aware that the school was under attack by the education authorities. I was accompanied by Alex Morganov, a student who missed last year's conference because the Immigration and Naturalization Service sent his papers too late for him to go to Ukraine. He was born in Russia and is not yet an American citizen. I was greeted by several of the students I had met on previous visits. I had taught many of them how to play table tennis. Oli, whom I had met when he first came three years ago was now ready to leave the school and go on to college. Jonas, from Germany, whom I had met when he first came and spoke little English, was now quite fluent and very self-assured. Meng-An, from Taiwan, had become the best table tennis player in the school, and was planning to go to the United States to live with relatives and continue his education. We had some nice matches while I was there. Uri is now a student at Summerhill, but I had met him previously at several IDEC conferences when he was a student at the Democratic School of Hadera, in Israel. His parents have moved to England. He was very involved in the upkeep of the computer room. Chris and Natasha are children of current staff members Ian and Lenka. She is a Summerhill Alumna herself. They had just come from the United States when I last visited, but are all quite central to the school by now. Many of the students and staff had just participated in a march on 10 Downing Street to protest the treatment of the school by OFSTED, the office of inspection. Among other things, the school had been told that its non- compulsory lessons conflicted with the imposition of the national curriculum. A pile of letters was given to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office. The Summerhillians were accompanied by many supporters, including English homeschoolers who realized that if Summerhill were discredited that they would be next. At the end of each of the three yearly terms, Summerhill has a big End of Term Party. It goes on through the night with popular dancing, country dancing, and snacks, as students leave for a one-month break. At this party the highlight was rapping in French, German in Japanese, with Henry and William, grandchildren of A.S Neill, now staff members, doing the record- scratching. Actually I missed most of this because I was doing a radio show on the Talk America Network from the school office, interviewing Carmen and Nathan, 14 year old Summerhill students who had participated in the march on 10 Downing Street, as well as a demonstration of the Summerhill meeting which took place at the House of Commons! I also interviewed Susan, Nathan’s mother, and a strong supporter. At midnight there was a gathering of all Summerhillians in a big circle, with those who were leaving in an inner circle as all sang Auld Lang Syne, followed by a lot of hugs and tears. I met several Summerhill Alumni at the EOT. One of them was a soft-spoken Japanese boy who helped us repaint the lines on the tennis court. His name is Yoshiki, and he told me he has just been accepted into the Royal Scottish Academy of Music. At my request he then played a very difficult and beautiful selection from Ravel on the piano. He said he learned music at Summerhill, which arranged private lessons for him. I met another former student who is now running his own photographic studio in Amsterdam, and a third, an American, who has a Japanese restaurant called Saga in a very fancy part of London. At his invitation we ate there on the last day and it was great. William Smith, an American film maker was at Summerhill making a documentary about the school. We helped him find funding so he could continue his project and release a film giving an accurate picture of Summerhill to help counteract the slanderous accusations made by OFSTED. After the End of Term party he brought us to the train and we traveled to Albert and Popsy Lamb’s house, in the Cotswolds, near Stroud, one of my favorite places in the world. Albert edited the new Summerhill book, a more recent editing of Neill’s writing, and both he and Popsy were students in the school. While we were there we went to a new site of one of those mysterious crop circles, afterward visiting Avebury, a standing stone circle similar to Stonehenge and also thousands of years old. We also visited Bath and the Roman ruins. While there we met two people who were aware of the Summerhill situation and very supportive of the school. One was from a comprehensive school and had students doing street theater. She said Summerhill was her ideal, but she couldn’t go that far in her school. The other was a former teacher in a Quaker school, now running a health- food restaurant. I was originally going to give a talk at Flexi-college in the north of England, but that was canceled with the college faced a sudden financial crisis and was threatened with closure. Nevertheless, a Mary Ann Rose, a homeschooler who lived near Stroud decided to track me down at Albert’s house and came over with her oldest son to interview me. She has created a program and publications to help beginning home educators. She works with a support group of 60 families. Returning to Summerhill for the IDEC on the evening of the 22nd, I met some of the first attendees. Many of them were AERO-related, and some were surprises. One of those was David French, who had first e mailed AERO from Poland and wants to start a democratic school there. Another was Christos Voulis, who originally contacted us from Greece and wants to start a school there. He expressed his great thanks for the support we had given him and even showed us an AERO article which had been translated into Greek and put into his journal. Also, Helen Hughes an AERO member from Windsor House School, a public alternative in Vancouver, Canada, joined us Tokyo Shure arrived from Japan with a group of 15, including 12 students. Jim Connor arrived. He is a board member of the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools and will teach this year at Upattinas School in PA. He had just been bicycle-riding in Spain. And had visited a school there, Los Muchachos, a school which takes students, some of whom are orphans, and trains them to be circus performers. He said they have new branches in South America. The next day the conference opened, and was to be governed in the style of the Summerhill democratic meeting, with a Summerhill student chairing. We talked about how decisions were going to be made during the conference. Decisions were made about quiet times, smoking, etc. At one point a special meeting was called because some people had been kept awake by noise the night before and have broken the rule which had been previously made. After long discussion it was decided to appoint "beddies officers" and two volunteered and were approved. But some were impatient with the meeting process and wanted to "get on with the conference." A proposal was made to end the meeting before the powers of the beddies officers were defined, and it passed, a decision which had at least one unfortunate results, which we will speak about later. There were a total of 167 people at the conference, made up as follows: 123 delegates, 19 Summerhill students, 16 other students/children and 9 Summerhill staff. They came from 19 different countries. (Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, England, Germany, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, United States, Wales) I took the participants through a networking exercise at the start of the conference. We made a big circle and brought various categories into the center and asked a few of each to explain their connection and background in a few seconds. The categories included those from out of the country, from democratic schools, from state schools, writers, administrators, students, etc. It was a quick way for people to get to know each other. Beyond Tokyo Shure and Summerhill there were not many students from democratic schools at the conference. About fifteen Summerhill students participated in the conference and their involvement was strong. We hope some of them will come to next year’s IDEC. One student came representing Sands School, and one student came from Hadera School in Israel.