Rather His Own Man

See Summerhill (CBBC, January 2008).

Car rallies were absurdly popular in ’50s Australia, especially the ‘Redex Trial’, in which familiar-brand vehicles were driven around the country. It was a big deal to be taken, age seven, to gawk at cars you could see on the streets, lined up before the start of the 1953 Redex Trial. I had completely forgotten my excitement until Peter Carey’s novel about it, A Long Way From Home (London: Faber, 2017), stirred my memory.

Lady Chatterley: Regina v Penguin Books Ltd (London: Penguin Books, 1990).

. H. Rolph (ed.), The Trial of

because they pay no heed to the supernatural; and they’re not politics, because they’re not populist. They are, however, drawn from all these disciplines, and more, in their efforts to define and enforce human values. Values which a democratic society can’t be neutral about. For students in our state schools, and teachers as well, they serve to show that privilege is an anachronism, dogma a distraction; freedom is a birthright and discrimination a wrong that should never be suffered. To the advantages of comprehensive education with its secularity, diversity and locality, let us now add humanity.

It’s surely time to put that insight back into and onto the school curriculum. Human rights are not history, because they aren’t past; they’re not law, because they’re still in flux; they’re not philosophy, although they do provide ethics for our time. Nor are they religion, be

children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burnt by high school and college graduates. So I’m suspicious of education. My request is to help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated morons. Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human.

I’m a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness, gas chambers built by learnt engineers, chil

These days when I talk to teachers, I advocate courses in human rights, which should be introduced (perhaps in the space allocated to religious studies) in all secondary schools. I recite the story of the headmistress who sent all her new teachers this letter:

from former Summerhillians – an astrophysicist, a philosopher and a Hollywood actress – whose free schooling had done no harm. That, I think, is the best thing that can be said about a school, and it could probably be said about Epping Boys High School in my day.