Outside of a Dog (22 page)

‘Education,’ he said, ‘is about achievement. Examinations are how we determine the level of achievement that has been attained.’

‘Do you still believe that? We must talk at length about this one day.’

He didn’t respond, and neither of us broached the subject again. I was glad, really, for my position on the matter wouldn’t have stood up to interrogation. I was there because I was
good at examinations, and proud of it. If you had taken away my academic qualifications I would have felt naked and bereft. I knew this, yet still felt that my progressive attitudes were
tenable.

Unfortunately, my experience at Oxford had been good for my self-esteem. I am told that one should feel proud of oneself and one’s achievements, but I frequently value the wrong things for
the wrong reasons. Pride resulting from, say, academic achievement, is a kind of false pride based on false goals. Does high academic achievement make one happy, or good? Does it fill you with
laughter and goodwill towards man? Look round the universities, and despair. No, I rather prefer moderate, vigilant self-esteem, scepticism directed inwards, self-doubt: those qualities of mind
that lead to humility, and to that irony which wryly registers the differences between the apparent and the real. And, ironically enough, I still feel proud of my academic achievements, when
I’m not mildly ashamed of them.

I may have been a success by academic standards, but that was a sign of some inner weakness in me, a capitulation, a failure of ego strength. If I’d had the guts I would have abandoned my
studies, and sought a way to have fun, to play a lot and to be happy. In 1967 I was offered a summer job as assistant professional at a tennis club in Mykonos. I should have taken it, and stayed,
given lessons and played in local tournaments, learned Greek, eaten in the taverna, drunk the local wines (except Retsina) and entertained the local women. I could have rented a little villa
overlooking the sea, got brown as a berry, kept my own hours, read whatever took my fancy, tried to write a novel. I might have become like that Lawrence Durrell. He seemed to be having a lot of
fun.

But being ‘in school’, as Americans continue to call it even while one is at university, was all I had ever done, and it rather frightened me to think of leaving it. I had no
experience, indeed no memories of
not
being in school. And the only genuinely happy ones were from my time at Burgundy Farm. It was the only school where I ever felt comfortable.

But schoolteaching wouldn’t have suited me. I haven’t the patience, the sheer grind would have worn me down. What I needed Neill for, I recognized, was not as a guide to good
teaching, but to good parenting. In 1973, reunited after a second separation, Barbara and I decided that, to make things work, we ought to have a child. My father, told the news, was rightly
sceptical. ‘But I feel biologically ready to be a father,’ I said, pulling myself up to the full height of my twenty-six years. I could virtually hear him not saying, in the ensuing
silence of that long-distance phone call, that it was
psychologically
ready that he was worried about.

Nothing prepares you for the birth of your first child, but I had been heartened by Neill’s description of the childhood of his daughter Zoe, raised with the freedom and generosity that
her father demonstrated and recommended. According to her proud father ‘scores of outsiders from all over the world’ had said of her: ‘Here is something quite new, a child of
grace and balance and happiness, at peace with her surroundings, not at war.’ Do we get a glimpse of the magi hovering round the Christ child here? I don’t mind the proud hyperbole, it
is wonderful for a parent to feel like that. I hoped I would too, and with equally good reason.

Anna entered the world as if reluctantly, struggling towards the light from a posterior position, almost as exhausted as her mother was. I’d done my bit at the top end with Barbara, joined
her in breathing exercises, massaged and encouraged, but when the going got rough, and the forceps came out, I was banished to the waiting room, and was chagrined at how relieved I felt. She had a
hard time, a stressed and unsympathetic doctor forcing the pace, and by the time I returned, baby Anna had been mysteriously removed, and Barbara was beyond consolation. Twenty minutes later I was
presented with a tiny red-faced bundle, and clutched her to me almost dangerously.

She had matted black strands of fine hair, a grumpy, rubbery little face, forehead skewed from the trauma of birth, and, magically, when she caught my eye she looked at me steadily for a long
time, as if to inquire what had just happened, what might have been done to avoid it, and who the hell I was. They say babies can’t focus, but it’s new born fathers who can’t. I
wept, squeezed her involuntarily, then gave her back to the hovering nurse, who was anxiously diagnosing a possible case of squashed baby syndrome, kissed Barbara good-bye, and went out to buy an
Indesit washing machine. We’d prepared a pink nursery with an adorable crib and lots of girly bits for Anna to come home to, which took a good few days while both she and her mother
recovered. I wandered the house, restlessly, reading Dr Spock, and thinking about A.S. Neill.

We’d agreed on the ground rules: baby Anna would eat when she wished, sleep as nature guided her. If she cried it would be for a reason, and we would comfort her, whenever. We had terry
towelling nappies, not having discovered disposable ones, and vowed that she could use them for as long as she wished: no toilet-training for her. She could grow up in her own way and in her own
time. I bought a blue corduroy sling and pouch, imported from California, that fitted round my back, so that she could rest comfortably on the porch of my stomach. I walked the house with her in
the early hours, as Barbara tried to sleep and Anna wept with colic, and later the pains of teething. When she wished, whatever the hour, I would take her for a ride in the car, which was often the
only thing that would soothe her. I pretended I was a taxi driver preparing for the knowledge, and learned many of the obscure byways of Leamington Spa and Warwick.

It was wonderful and awful. It wasn’t long before I was claiming, ruefully, that until having a baby I hadn’t believed in original sin. I hadn’t expected the confrontations,
the tears, the relentless neediness, the constant desire for attention, the unrelenting egotism. Not
her
, she was a baby, they’re like that. I mean
me
. I’d never been
asked so much, had to give up so much. My life was dominated by fatherhood, and I wasn’t (as my father had feared) entirely ready for it. Too much for them, not enough for me. I was so
overwhelmed that this palpable selfishness hardly even embarrassed me. I was too tired to be embarrassed. What happened to my sex life? What was it like to sleep for a full night? To see my
friends? Play snooker or tennis? Go out to dinner? Travel somewhere, anywhere?

None of the above. Just the daily grind of unbearable love. We had given Anna her head, in the best Neillian manner: she lived at her own self-regulated pace, and we accommodated ours to hers.
Barbara was better at it than I was. But within a year we agreed that maybe good old A.S. Neill had overstated his case (or maybe he was just better than us), and we decided occasionally to let
Anna cry herself to sleep, and began gently to insist that she ate what, and when, we wished her to. It was a bit of a compromise, and it made life easier. After all, Neill insists that the innate
selfishness of children lasts well into the teenage years, and it was exhausting merely to contemplate the carnage. Surely we could be a little selfish too?

But Neill is an absolutist here: freedom is not to be compromised, standards and regulations not to be imposed. It wasn’t enough that little Anna, by the age of three, was utterly
gorgeous, talkative, charming, pretty much self-regulating, and swore like a trooper. I wouldn’t call her an entirely happy child, that would have been difficult in the context of her
parents’ marriage, but she was a considerable live wire, and a source of joy for us both. There are, Neill insists, no problem children, only problem parents, and we could see Anna paying
some of the price in sleeplessness and anxiety. Was Neill wrong, or were we? I don’t know, and there is no way to find out. The world in which Barbara and I found ourselves hardly allowed the
rearing of free children, and to raise a Neillian little person in a relentlessly directive, frequently ugly, social environment is nigh impossible, as Neill acknowledges. We certainly would not
have allowed her to go to Summerhill, however much we believed in it. Even if the home environment and schooling were worse for her, we wanted her with us, and she would have hated leaving home.
She went to the free-est schools Leamington could provide, and years later Bertie spent a few years at King Alfred’s School in London, where Neill had once taught. He loved it, and the kids
were as free as birds, and almost as flighty as Mayzie.

In that very period, though, Summerhill was under attack, in a way that seemed to me shocking and inexplicable. Neill had been dead for many years, but much honoured in his time with honorary
degrees and citations, and his works were required reading in education courses. Summerhill was a world famous school, and England should have been proud of it.

As early as 1949 the (rather enlightened) school inspectors who reported on the school praised Neill as a man of unusual integrity, described the children as ‘natural, open-faced, and
unselfconscious’ to a remarkable degree, and gave their blessing to the school’s ethos and continued existence. But it was a constant source of anxiety, at Summerhill, that one day the
wrong inspectors might just turn up. Fifty years later, they did. A teacher at the time described their visit: ‘I think the first image I have of it was when they came down the drive and
there were eight of them marching with clipboards and suits. They were in twos.’

This ominous, robotic precision suggests a military attack – eight was an unusually large contingent – by bureaucrats who had clearly made up their minds before they arrived. The
eight of them snooped about, quizzed teachers and children in a hostile manner, sniffed, looked down their educational noses, harrumphed in disapproval. The children didn’t even have to
attend classes! Lazy little buggers! They could play all the time if they wanted! How were they ever going to pass exams?

This was hardly news. It had been like that since 1921, but the disapproving inspectors were determined that, after seventy-eight years, something was going to be done about it. They recommended
the closure of Summerhill unless it modified its practices. Estelle Morris, then Secretary of State for Education, gave a typically Blairite account of the matter:
of course
Summerhill was
entitled to its own philosophy, how marvellous, they just shouldn’t practise it. Surely the children could at the very least be encouraged to attend lessons? Otherwise, they might (in the
inspectors’ words) ‘confuse the pursuit of idleness for the exercise of personal liberty’.

Summerhill was hardly likely to capitulate to such an attack, and the inspectors soon ruled that it be shut down. The school appealed, citing the report as manifestly biased and incompetent in a
remarkable number of ways. The details of the ensuing battle are disturbing, and comical, but the essential case was simply and eloquently put by Geoffrey Robertson QC: ‘It is freedom or
nothing, because if it is less than freedom it is not Summerhill.’

The loss of such a school, such a national asset, should not be contemplated. Summerhill fought and fought, and won. Distinguished educationists and former students spoke up on its behalf.
Statistics were produced that showed that Summerhillians, in fact, did rather better than the national average at examinations. The ensuing case cost the school £130,000, and contributions
flowed in from round the world. An attack on Summerhill was an attack on one of the foremost incarnations of the very idea of freedom. Freedom to be and to grow as one wants, freedom not to be
directed, freedom to have one’s own voice. Freedom from
schooling
, as it is usually understood. ‘We are faced,’ said Bertrand Russell (who founded a progressive school with
his wife Dora in 1927), ‘with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.’

Called ‘the oldest children’s democracy in the world’, the school has always been run on a one-person one-vote basis, and at school meetings the five-year-olds had as much
right to speak, deliberate and vote as Neill did. (They fired him once, and he pottered about contentedly in his workshop until he was rehired a couple of weeks later.) The system works wonderfully
well, and has been a model for those mitigated examples of student representation in the student councils that are now commonplace in most schools.

But that’s just a sop, and everyone knows it. Administrators and teachers actually run schools, and though they claim to be keen to hear student opinion, it is their own that counts. All
animals are equal, Orwell’s
Animal Farm
reminds us, only some are more equal than others. Except at Summerhill. I wish I’d got that job. I would have loved it, all of it, even
– particularly – the voting. But I’d bet that Summerhill graduates are even less likely than I to vote for politicians. How could you participate in such a farce when you have
direct experience of what a real democracy feels like?

The answer to this sceptical dismissiveness may be found in a single word: Obama. I had managed, in my fastidious withdrawal from political engagement, to resist the political attractiveness of
Bobby Kennedy (spoiled rich kid), George McGovern (boring), even of Bill Clinton (rather fun, but smarmy). But Obama? I began my engagement with him in ignorant scepticism, and was gradually won
over, and finally converted. He was both one of us and different. He carried himself with perfect ease, was not disfigured by either ideology or a need to be liked. If anyone could make one less
embarrassed by America and Americanness, it was this remarkable hybrid. Though obviously highly ambitious, he struck one not as a politician, neither on the make nor (like Tony Blair) in love with
the mere taking of power, but as a complex and highly admirable person, offering himself wholly and humbly. How could one not vote for him?