A Dominie Dismissed

A.S. Neill, the radical educator who would later found Summerhill School, wrote this semi-autobiographical novel as a passionate defense of child freedom against the crushing machinery of Victorian education. The Dominie is a schoolmaster in a Scottish village who refuses to cane, exam, or constrain his students, instead, he lets them play, think, and grow naturally. His "go-as-you-please methods" lead inevitably to his dismissal, and he is forced to watch from the margins as a rigid disciplinarian takes his place. What unfolds is both a tender elegy for lost teaching and a quiet vindication: the children, taught to think for themselves, eventually turn on their new master. Written in 1917, this is Neill's origin story, the moment when his educational philosophy first took literary form, years before it would revolutionize schooling across the world. For anyone curious about where progressive education came from, this is where it began.