Carl Rogers

1. Carl Rogers • For Carl Rogers, learning is experiential when it includes the ‘The whole person, both in feeling and in cognitive aspects’ and when it ‘makes a difference in the behavior, the attitudes, perhaps even the personality of the learner’ (Rogers and Freiberg, 1994: 36)

2. A.S. NEILL (1883 - 1973) AND SUMMERHILL: FREEDOM AND EXPERIENTIAL LIVING

3. Introduction • This week we turn to ideas and practice of the Scottish educator, A.S. Neill (1883-1973). • Neill connected experiential learning to freedom. • For Neill, experiential learning is a way of life.

4. Summerhill School and experiential learning as a way of life • ‘When my wife and I began the school, we had one main idea: to make the school fit the child – instead of making the child fit the school’ (Neill, 1968: 20). • To understand Neill’s view of freedom and experiential learning we engage with the following two questions: • What principles inform experiential learning in Summerhill? • What is the nature of experiential learning in Summerhill?

5. What principles inform experiential learning?

6. What is it that Neill wants the child to experience? • Neill had, he maintained, ‘a complete belief in the child as good’, and for ‘over forty years, this belief in the goodness of the child has never wavered; it rather has become a final faith’ (Neill, 1968: 20). • Experiential learning is thus based on the principle that children must be free to create their own learning experiences. • Learning experiences cannot be imposed onto the children.

7. Against authority • Obviously, a school that makes active children sit at desks studying mostly useless subjects is a bad school. It is a good school only for those … uncreative citizens who want docile, uncreative children who will fit into a civilisation whose standard of success is money. (Neill, 1968: 19-20) • At Summerhill: ‘we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction’ (Neill, 1968: 20). • There is ‘no deference to a teacher as a teacher. Staff and pupils have the same food and obey he same community laws’ (Neill, 1968: 26).

8. The positive aspect of freedom and experiential learning: happiness • Experiential learning allows children to discover for themselves, without interference from anyone else, what their needs and concerns are. • ‘I hold that the aim of life is to find happiness, which means to find interest’ (Neill, 1968: 36). • ‘It is an absurd curriculum that makes a prospective dressmaker study quadratic equations or Boyle’s Law’ (Neill, 1968: 39). • The function of the child is to live his own life – not the life that his anxious parents think he should live … All interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots. (Neill, 1968: 27)

9. The positive aspect of freedom and experiential learning: happiness • For Neill, then, experiential learning is about experiencing what makes one happy and not conforming to the wishes of others. Neill asserts: ‘I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar’ (Neill, 1968: 20). • ‘Summerhill is possibility the happiest school in the world’ (Neill, 1968: 23).

11. Approval • ‘Summerhill is a school in which the child knows that he is approved of’ (Neill, 1968: 23). • Neill claims that many parents do not grasp the ‘distinction between freedom and licence’; he suggests that parents and schools tend towards extremes: • In the disciplined home, the children have no rights. In the spoiled home, they have all the rights. The proper home is one in which children and adults have equal rights. And the same applies to schools. (Neill, 1968: 105)

12. Experiential education and the whole-person • Neill writes of talking to students in teaching training colleges; he claimed that ‘they have been taught to know, but have not been allowed to feel’ (original emphasis, Neill, 1968: 38). • [C]assroom walls and the prisonlike buildings narrow the teacher’s outlook, and prevent him from seeing the true essentials of education. His work deals with the part of a child that is above the neck … the emotional, vital part of the child is foreign territory to him. (Neill, 1968: 40)

13. Experiential education and the whole-person • [M]y contention is that unfree education results in life that cannot be lived fully. Such an education almost entirely ignores the emotions of life; and because these emotions are dynamitic, their lack of opportunity for expression must and does result in cheapness and ugliness and hatefulness. Only the head is educated. Of the emotions are permitted to be really free, the intellect will look after itself. (original emphasis, Neill, 1968: 99)

14. The negative aspect of freedom: absence of fear and teaching • ‘It is the idea of non-interference with the growth of the child and non-pressure on the child that has made the school what it is´ (original emphasis, Neill, 1968: 91). • The opposite of the freedom to engage in experiential learning is, for Neill, the imposition of fear. Neill writes: ‘the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child’ (Neill, 1968: 24) • Thus, Neill: no child at Summerhill experiences ‘wrath or moral indignation’, no child fears ‘being lectured [at] or being punished’ (Neill, 1968: 25).

15. Freedom from teaching • But freedom from interference means freedom from being taught. • ‘Every time we show Tommy how his engine works we are stealing from that child the joy of life – the joy of overcoming an obstacle’ (Neill, 1968: 37). • Neill presents as with a view of teaching as a form of instruction, as a form of interference.

16. Freedom from teaching • In experiential learning, Neill suggests, the emphasis is on the child’s learning and not the teacher’s teaching: • Many so-called educators believe that it does not matter what a child learns as long as he is taught something. And, of course, with schools as they are – just mass-production factories – what can a teacher do but teach something and come to believe that teaching, in itself, matters most of all? (original emphasis, Neill, 1968: 40)

17. Questing Neill • Does Neill deny the important responsibility of the teacher to know the world and to pass on that knowledge to a younger generation? • Without teachers performing this role, how is knowledge of the world to be sustained?

18. What goes on in a school where children can constantly engage in experiential learning?

19. Freedom of choice • ‘The pupils do not have to stand room inspection and no one picks up after them. They are left free. No one tells them what to wear: they put on any kind of costume they want to at any time’ (Neill, 1968: 27). • Optional lessons: ‘Children can go to them or stay away from them – for years if they want’ (Neill, 1968: 20).However: ‘The average period of recovery from lessons aversion is three months’ (Neill, 1968: 21). • Only teachers have timetables.‘My staff and I have a hearty hatred of all examinations’ (Neill, 1968: 23).

20. General meetings and ‘self-government’ • All school rules are determined at General School Meetings, where each child and member of staff has a vote: ‘everyone has equal rights’ (Neill, 1968: 24) • Again, this brings us to Neill view of experiential learning as something that is constant, a way of life: • ‘the school that has no self-government should not be called a progressive school… You cannot have freedom unless children feel completely free to govern their own social life’ (Neill, 1968: 59).

21. Questing Summerhill • To what extent was your experience of school similar to that of students at Summerhill? • If your experiences were similar, do you wish they had been different? • If your experiences were very different, do you wish they had been similar?

22. Reflecting on experiential learning:

23. Summerhill General Policy Statement 1. To provide choices and opportunities that allow children to develop at their own pace and to follow their own interests.2. To allow children to be free from compulsory or imposed assessment, allowing them to develop their own goals and sense of achievement. 3. To allow children to be completely free to play as much as they like. 4. To allow children to experience the full range of feelings free from the judgement and intervention of an adult.5. To allow children to live in a community that supports them and that they are responsible for; in which they have the freedom to be themselves, and have the power to change community life, through the democratic process. http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/school_policies_statement.html

24. In summery • According to Neill, experiential learning occurs when children: • learn without interference • can discover for themselves what their interests and needs are • learn as ‘whole people’ • feel they are approved of and not judged • allowed to ‘self-govern’