The Schools That Said No: Summerhill, Sudbury Valley, and the Freedom Schools That Changed America

What happens when you hand control of a school completely to the students themselves?

In 1921, a Scottish educator named A.S. Neill founded a school in Suffolk, England that tried to find out. He called it Summerhill, and for more than a century it has operated as one of the most radical experiments in self-directed education in the world. Students at Summerhill aren’t required to attend any classes. They aren’t required to do much of anything, really, except abide by the school’s rules, which are made not by adults but by the students themselves, in a weekly community meeting where every student and every staff member has equal voting rights.

We’re now in the seventh article in this series on the history of self-directed learning, and we’ve arrived at the 1960s: one of the most turbulent and creative decades in the history of American and global education. This is the era of the free school movement, of radical democratic schooling, of the civil rights-era freedom schools, and of educators who were willing to go very far in insisting that learners, not institutions, should be in charge of learning.

Summerhill predates the 1960s, but Neill’s 1960 book, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, became a bestseller in the United States during the decade and was enormously influential on the free school movement. Neill’s central conviction was that most of the damage done to children by schooling was the result of compulsion. Force a child to learn, he argued, and you damage their natural curiosity and their sense of self. Give children real freedom (not the managed pseudo-freedom of most progressive schools) and they’ll find their own way.

This was more than a pedagogical argument. It was a psychological and political one. Neill believed that the authoritarian school was producing authoritarian people: people who had learned to obey rather than to think, who were afraid of their own desires and instincts, and who were therefore susceptible to political manipulation. Education for freedom, he argued, was education for democracy in the deepest sense.

The free school movement of the 1960s and early 1970s took these ideas and ran with them, sometimes wisely and sometimes chaotically. Hundreds of free schools appeared across the United States, many of them started by young, idealistic teachers and parents who had read Neill’s book and were determined to try something different. Most of them were short-lived. The practical difficulties of running schools on democratic principles (funding, governance, the challenge of serving children with widely varying needs) proved formidable.

One free school that has lasted is the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, founded in 1968. Sudbury shares a lot of Summerhill’s DNA. There’s no curriculum. There are no required classes, no grades, and no tests. Students of all ages (from about four to nineteen) spend their days as they choose: talking, reading, building, cooking, playing games, pursuing whatever interests them. The school is governed democratically, and students participate in all major decisions about school life, including staff hiring.

Sudbury has been operating for over 55 years, which makes it one of the longest-running self-directed learning environments in the United States. Longitudinal studies of Sudbury graduates suggest that they go on to lead successful, self-directed adult lives, pursue higher education when that is what they want, and report high levels of personal satisfaction. Sudbury would argue that this isn’t surprising: if you spend 14 years practicing self-direction, you tend to get good at it. The habits that most schools try to install through curriculum and structure, Sudbury simply makes necessary for daily life.

But the most important SDL stories from the 1960s may not be the ones that happened in the alternative schools of New England and California. They may be the ones that happened in the rural South, in church basements and community halls, in places where literacy itself was an act of resistance.

The Citizenship Schools were literacy programs developed in the late 1950s by Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins, initially in connection with the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Their purpose was simple and profound: to teach Black Southerners to read and write so they could pass the voter literacy tests that were being used to systematically disenfranchise them. These schools were genuinely dangerous. Participants risked losing their jobs, their homes, and sometimes their lives.

The Citizenship Schools were self-directed in the deepest sense: they were organized by and for communities that had been systematically excluded from both formal education and political participation. The teachers weren’t credentialed professionals but community members who were slightly more literate than their neighbors. The curriculum was entirely practical and entirely purposeful: everything was oriented toward the goal of passing the literacy test and exercising the right to vote.

Here’s what matters for the history of SDL: the Citizenship Schools are evidence that self-directed learning isn’t, and has never been, a luxury available only to privileged families who want something different for their children. For the participants in those church-basement schools, the ability to direct their own learning was a matter of survival and freedom. SDL, at its roots, has always been connected to questions of power and liberation.

Martin Luther King Jr. credited Septima Clark with doing more to transform the South than perhaps any other single individual, precisely because of the way she organized learning communities around political self-determination. SNCC — the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — used the Citizenship School model in voter registration campaigns across the South. The Freedom Schools of 1964, established as part of Freedom Summer in Mississippi, followed the same tradition.

Taken together, Summerhill, Sudbury, the Free School Movement, and the Citizenship Schools represent a decade in which the most fundamental question in the history of SDL was being contested at every level of society: Who gets to be in charge of learning? The answers these movements gave weren’t all the same. Neill and Sudbury placed individual autonomy at the center. The Citizenship Schools placed solidarity and collective purpose at the center.

These aren’t entirely compatible visions, and the tension between them is one the SDL field has never fully resolved. I think that’s a productive tension, one worth sitting with rather than prematurely dissolving. Because both visions are pointing at something real: the extraordinary capacity of human beings to learn when they are trusted, supported, and free.

This work draws from my book, Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning, if you geek out about this stuff and want a deeper dive.

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