A. S. Neill and Summerhill

Abstract

Both Reddie and Badley had been educated at a public school, one in Scotland and one in England. Despite being orphaned from an early age, Reddie grew up as Badley did in a middle-class surrounding and each had a highly successful university career straight from school. A. S. Neill had a different start in life and has remained a different kind of influence in progressive education from his first entry. Both the older men had established their reputations as educational radicals by the end of the century and Neill did not start his life work, for reasons which will appear, until after the end of the First World War. He was twenty-five years younger than Reddie, he started Summerhill thirtyfive years after Abbotsholme, about three years before Reddie’s retirement. This third educational innovator comes from a different generation and he has remained for more than forty years true to a set of educational ideas not only much more extreme than Reddie’s or Badley’s, but more radical than those of any other educator in England at any time.¹