Word: meannesses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pupils often work out their repressed hate of their elders by biting, scratching, swearing interminably and "being generally anti-social." Says Mrs. Neill: "A small boy will sometimes walk in here, fix me with a glare and say, 'You stupid bitch.' But it doesn't mean anything to me. I know he's working up some hate he has." Sometimes the little fellow returns and says experimentally: 'You silly cow.'" Mrs. Neill fails to react, and the boy is supposed to lose his little inhibition...
...unenlightened stopgap teachers reacted much like new children to the school's free atmosphere. They swore a great deal, were mean, spiteful and irresponsible. "Quite hopeless," says Mrs. Neill. No doubt they felt that they had a case. Says one current teacher: "Believe me, it is the hard way. Sometimes it is no longer possible to bear it. Then the only thing to do is to clear out completely for a few hours. The noise is the worst thing...
Others find the continual damage to property the hardest thing to bear. Neill is particularly sensitive about the way students smash up his school. But he says that one has to face the fact that children are not possessive about objects. Furniture, says Neill, means nothing to a child. Everything at Summerhill is as tough and unbreakable as possible, but it is still difficult for adults not to lose their tempers when students tear up favorite books or shatter records. But, says Neill, the children don't mean any harm...
...Haven in the early 1900s explore the functions of the college, where, by his estimate, little education was given or gained, and the plight of the faculty which "never, so far as we know, got drunk, swore, fornicated, swindled, never did anything except lie, play politics and be mean...
...make any apology for putting the failure of the church on this personal level ... I think that the first business of the church is to redeem me. And I don't mean to redeem me in the merely social sense which convinces me that the Golden Rule ought to be my Confession of Faith. By redeeming me, I mean personal redemption-the process by which I'm spiritually shaken apart and spiritually put together again, and from which I-the personal I-emerge a totally different person...