Freedom and authority in Alexander Sutherland Neill's and Jean Jacques Rousseau's philosophy of education

Freedom is, together with language, considered a defining quality of human beings. Before children can be free and autonomous adults, however, they have to be educated, which often means invoking authority to limit their freedom to prevent harmful actions and to guide children to pursuits that educators deem beneficial. Thus freedom and authority are central categories in the philosophy of education.;Two of the authors who have questioned the use of direct authority in the interaction with children are J. J. Rousseau (1712-1778) and A. S. Neill (1883-1973). Neill founded Summerhill, a school where authority is distributed evenly among the members of the community, including children. Rousseau, on the other hand, delineated in his Emile, or on Education a natural education, as he called it, in which he mainly relied on setting up educational situations (instead of using authority directly to influence children).;This comparative study casts a critical eye at both authors' works, the one as the founder of the world's most controversial school and the other as one of the most prominent and controversial educational philosophers. It aims at establishing a thorough understanding of both writers' conceptions on freedom and authority in education, which is necessary to become clear about educational alternatives and their likely psychological and sociological effects.;This study had yielded some unanticipated results. Rousseau's philosophy of education, which ostensibly was meant to lessen the restraints on children, has turned out to be a theory of how educators can increase their power over children. In the case of Neill and Summerhill, a thorough analysis has generated a pattern of beneficial interaction with children and a life-affirming conception of human nature that could provide a model for educators who are searching for remedies to unsuccessful educational practice.