Monday, January 21, 2008

Summerhill and the Central Thread of Life

Can a school function effectively if it focuses on love and freedom for children, or would there be anarchy and uneducated kids? If it can work, can we all learn from this experience? Glen Allport explores the Summerhill School and its results, and what it can teach the rest of us about love and freedom. Here's an exerpt:

The failure to understand that love includes freedom – that it must include freedom, because the two qualities are a binary in human life – is among the more common and important misunderstandings of love. Freedom itself is thus widely misunderstood as well; in particular, even the freedom movement often seems blind to the truth that freedom in the human realm must include love; again, the two qualities require each other. A free market run by sociopaths is not a stable situation, for example. I use the phrase "love and freedom" so often because those two qualities – that is, the two sides of this basic human duality – are so frequently seen as being in opposition to each other. This mistake is constantly fostered by the media and by others interested in maintaining the corrupt status quo.

Freedom is an integral part of the thread of love, and when you hear otherwise, know that you are hearing a lie. Indeed, coercion and love are mortal enemies.

Read Glen Allport's entire article

And also see more of Glen's writings at http://www.paradise-paradigm.net

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