I have spent a good deal of my time patching up the children who have been wounded by people who gave them fear. Fear can be a terrible thing in a child's life. Fear must be entirely eliminated-fear of adults, fear of punishment, fear of disapproval, fear of God. Only hate can flourish in an atmosphere of fear.

We are afraid of so many things-afraid of poverty, afraid of ridicule, afraid of ghosts, afraid of burglars, afraid of accidents, afraid of public opinion, afraid of disease, afraid of death. A man's life is the story of his fears. Millions of adults fear to walk in the dark. Thousands have a vague feeling of uneasiness when a policeman rings the doorbell. Most travelers have fantasies of the ship's sinking or of the airplane's being wrecked. Railway travelers seek the middle coaches of a train. "Safety First" expresses man's leading concern.

There must have been a time in the history of man when the fear of being killed made him flee and hide. Today, life has become so safe that fear in the service of self-protection is no longer necessary. And yet today, humanity probably experiences more fear than did our Stone Age ancestors. Primitive man had only the large-bodied monsters to fear, but we have many monsters-trains, ships, airplanes, burglars, automobiles and, most potent of all, the fear of being found out. Fear is still necessary for us. Fear makes me cross the street carefully.

In nature, fear serves the purpose of race preservation. Rabbits and horses have survived because of the fear that forced them to run from danger. Fear is an important factor in the law of the wild.

Fear is always egoistic: we fear for our own skins, or for those we love. But mostly, we fear for our own skins. When I was a boy I used to fear the dark evening walk to the farm for the milk. Yet, when my sister went with me, I had no fear that she would be murdered on the way. Fear must be egoistic, for every fear is ultimately a fear of death.

A hero is a man who can change his fear into positive energy. The hero harnesses his fear. The fear of being afraid is the most distressing fear in a soldier. The coward is incapable of converting his fear into positive action. Cowardice is much more universal than bravery.

We are all cowards. Some of us manage to hide our cowardice; others betray it. Cowardice is always relative. You can be heroic about certain things and cowardly about others. I recall my first lesson in bomb-throwing as a recruit. One man failed to throw his bomb over into the pit. It exploded and knocked out a few men. Luckily none were killed. The bombing was ended for that day; but on the following day, we were marched back to the bombing ground. When I picked up my first bomb, my hand trembled. The sergeant looked at me with contempt and told me I was a damned coward. I admitted it.

This sergeant, a man who had done deeds deserving of the Victoria Cross, knew no physical fear. But not long afterwards he confided to me: "Neill, I hate to drill a squad when you are in it. I'm in a dead funk all the time." Surprised, I asked him why.

"Because you have an M.A. degree," he said-"and I murder the grammar."

We cannot tell from a study of psychology why one child is born with courage, but another is born with a shrinking soul Prenatal conditions may have much to do with it. If a child is not wanted, it is quite possible that the mother transfers her own anxiety at the moment of birth to the unborn child. It

may be that the unwanted child is born with a timid nature, with a character that fears life and desires to stay in the womb.

Although prenatal influences are beyond our power to deal with, it is certain that many children are made cowards by their early training. Cowardice of this kind is preventable.

A well-known psychoanalyst told me of the case of a young man. At the age of six, he was caught by his father expressing a mild sexual interest in a girl of seven. The father gave him a severe hiding. The hiding made the boy a coward for life. All through life he felt compelled to repeat that early experience~he kept looking for the beating, for punishment in one form or another. Thus, he could fall in love only with forbidden fruit, with women who were married or engaged; and he always experienced a great fear that the husband or lover would thrash him. The same fear was transferred to everything. The man was an unhappy, timid soul, always feeling inferior, always anticipating danger. He betrayed his timidity in little things. On a bright summer's day he would take a raincoat and an umbrella if he had to walk half a mile. He said no to life.

Punishing a child for an infantile sexual interest is a sure way to make that child a coward. Threatening hell fire is an-other sure way.

Freudians speak much about the castration complex. There certainly is a castration complex. At Summerhill we had a tiny chap who had been told that his penis would be cut off if he touched it. I find this to be a common fear in boys and girls. It is a fear that has terrible consequences, for a fear and a wish are never far apart. Often the fear of castration is a wish for castration-for castration as a punishment for masturbation, for castration as a means of getting rid of temptation.

To the frightened child sex is everything! Yes, the child uses sex as the chief peg on which to hang his fears. For he has been told that sex is wicked. The child with night terrors I:

often the child who is afraid of his sex thoughts. The devil may come and take him to hell, for is he not a sinful boy who deserves punishment? The bogeyman, the ghost, the goblin are only the devil in disguise. Fear comes from a guilty conscience. It is the ignorance of the parents that gives the child his guilty conscience.

A common form of fear in children originates from sleeping in their parents' room. A child of four will see and overhear what he cannot understand. Father becomes a bad man who abuses mother. Sadism in the child may result from this early misunderstanding and fears. The boy, identifying himself with father, later becomes a youth who associates sex with suffering. Out of fear he may do to his partner what he thought father did to mother.

Let me try to distinguish between anxiety and fear. Fear of a tiger is natural and healthy. Fear of being driven in a car by a bad driver is also natural and healthy. If we had no fear, we should all be run down by buses. But fear of a spider or a mouse or a ghost is unnatural and unhealthy. That kind of fear is merely anxiety. It is a phobia. A phobia is an irrational, exaggerated anxiety about something. In a phobia the object that excites terror is a comparatively harmless one. The object is only a symbol, although the anxiety it causes is real enough.

In Australia, fear of a spider is rational, for a spider can be death-dealing. In England and the United States, fear of a spider is irrational and therefore a phobia. The spider is a symbol for something else that one fears deep down. Thus, a child's fear of ghosts is a phobia. The ghosts symbolize something that the child is afraid of. It may be death, if he has had a God-fearing training. Or it might be his own sex impulses which his home has taught him to dread and repress as sinful.

I was once asked to see a schoolgirl who had a phobia of earthworms. I asked her to draw one and she drew a penis. Then she told me of a soldier who used to exhibit himself to her on her way to sch_ool. This had frightened her. The fear was displaced to earthworms. But long before this phobia had developed, the girl had already been extremely interested in the origin of the phobia-neurotically interested. This neurotic interest had resulted from her education-or lack of it-in sex matters. The mystery and secrecy with which these matters were treated by her elders gave her an abnormal interest in them. Certainly she ought never to have been exposed to an exhibitionist, but a better education on sex matters would have enabled her to go through the ordeal without reacting neurotically to it, without a lasting anxiety about the male sexual organ.

Phobias often occur in quite young children. The son of a stern father may develop a phobia of horses or lions or policemen. The phobia becomes attached to these or any other obvious father symbols. Here again we see the awful danger of introducing fear of authority into a child's life.

The most potent influence for fear in a child's life is the idea of eternal damnation.

Often, in the street, I hear a mother say, "Stop that, Tommy! Here's the policeman coming!" A minor consequence of this kind of talk is that the child early discovers that his mother is a liar. The major evil consequence lies in the fact that to the child the policeman is the devil. He is the man who takes you away and locks you up in darkness. The child always attaches the fear to his worst transgressions. Thus the child who masturbates may show abnormal terror of a policeman when the latter catches him throwing stones. The fear is really a fear of a punishing god and a punishing devil.

Much fear is also due to thoughts of our past criminal acts. We have all killed people in fantasy. I believe that the child of five kills me in fantasy when I thwart his wishes.

Many a day, my pupils will joyfully cover me with water pistols and cry, "Hands up! You're dead!", thus killing the authority symbol and relieving their fears. I have purposely acted in an authoritative manner on certain mornings in order to see the effect on the day's shooting. I have been killed many times on such occasions. After the fantasy, fear enters-Suppose Neill were to die! I would be the guilty one, for 1 wished st.

One of our girl pupils delighted in pulling other pupils under the water in swimming. Later, she developed a phobia about water. Although a good swimmer, she never went beyond her depth. What had happened was that in fantasy she had drowned so many rivals that she now feared poetic justice:

As a punishment for my thoughts) I'll be drowned.

Little Albert used to get into a state of terror when he stood on the beach and watched his father swimming. He was afraid, because he had so often wished for his father's death. He was afraid of his guilty conscience. It is not so shocking to realize that a child kills people in fantasy when we realize that to a child death is simply getting the feared person out of the way.

I have seen adults who are unconsciously convinced that they were responsible for a father's death or a mother's death. This kind of fear is one that could be lessened if parents would refrain from rousing the child's hate, and consequent guilt, by storming and beating. And the hundreds of schools that still use physical punishment or other types of strict punishment are doing irreparable wrong to little children.

Many people believe down deep: If children have nothing to fear, how can they be good? Goodness that depends on fear ₉f hell or fear of the policeman or fear of punishment is not goodness at all-it is simply cowardice. Goodness that depends on hope of reward or hope of praise or hope of heaven depends on bribery. Present-day morality makes children cowards, for it makes them fear life. And that is what the "goodness" of disciplined pupils really amounts to. Thousands of teachers do their work splendidly without having to introduce fear of punishment. The others are incompetent misfits who ought to be driven out of the profession.

Children may fear us and then accept our values. And what values we adults have! This week I bought a dog for seven dollars, tools for my turning lathe for ten dollars, and tobacco for eleven dollars. Although I reflect on and deplore our social evils, it did not occur to me to give all that money to the poor. Therefore, I don't preach to children that slums are an abomination unto the world. I used t~before I realized what a humbug I was about it.

The happiest homes I know are those in which the parents are frankly honest with their children without moralizing. Fear does not enter these homes. Father and son are pals. Love can thrive. In other homes, love is crushed by fear. Pretentious dignity and demanded respect hold love aloof. Compelled respect always implies fear.

Here, at Summerhill, children who fear their parents haunt the teacher's sitting room. The children of really free parents never come near us. The frightened children are always testing us out. One boy of eleven, whose father is a strict man, opens my door twenty times a day. He looks in, says nothing, and shuts the door again. I sometimes cry out to him, "No, I'm not dead yet." The boy has given me the love that his own father would not accept, and he has a fear that his ideal new father may disappear. Behind this fear is really hidden the wish that his unsatisfactory father would disappear.

It is much easier to live with children who fear you than with children who love you-that is, you have a quieter life. For when they fear? you, children give you a wide berth. My wife and I and the Summerhill staff are loved by the children because we approve of them, and that is all they want. It is be-

cause they know that we will not give them disapproval that they enjoy being close to us.

I find hardly any fear of thunder among our small children. They will sleep out in small tents through the most violent storm. Nor do I find much fear of the dark. Sometimes a boy of eight will pitch his tent right at the far end of the field, and he will sleep there alone for nights. Freedom encourages fearless-ness. I have often seen timid little chaps grow into sturdy, fear less youths. But to generalize would be wrong, for there are introverted children who never become brave. Some folks keep their ghosts for life.

If a child has been brought up without fear, and in spite of that still has fears, then it is possible that he has brought his fears with him into the world. And the chief 'difficulty in dealing with ghosts of this type is our ignorance of prenatal conditions. For no one knows whether or not a pregnant mother can convey her own fears to her unborn child.

On the other hand, a child most certainly acquires fears from the world around him. Today, even small children cannot help hearing about coming wars with their terrible atom bombs. It is only natural to associate fear with such things. But if there is no unconscious fear of sex and hell to compound the reality-fear of bombs, the fear of bombs will be a normal one-not a phobia, not a pervasive anxiety. Healthy, free children do not fear the future. They anticipate it gladly. Their children in their turn will face life without the sick fear of to-morrow.

It was Wilhelm Reich who pointed out that, in sudden fear, we all catch our breath for the moment, and that the child who lives in fear has a life of catching its breath . . . and holding it. The sign of a well-reared child is his free, uninhibited breathing. It shows that he is not afraid of life.

I have some important things to say to the father who is concerned about raising his child free from the crippling fear born of hate or distrust:

Never try to be the boss, the censor, the ogre in your home that your wife implies you to be when she says, "Wait till Daddy comes home!" Don't stand for that! It means that you will get the hate that should have gone to your wife at the moment.

And do not put yourself on a pedestal. If your boys ask you if you ever wet the bed or ever masturbated, tell them the truth ~outrageously and sincerely. If you are a boss, you will get their respect, but respect of the wrong kind-the kind mixed with fear. If you come down to their level and tell them how cowardly you were as a boy at school, you will get their true respect-the respect that contains love and understanding and a complete absence of fear.

It is comparatively easy for parents to rear a child without giving him complexes. The child must never be made afraid, must never be made to feel guilty. One cannot eliminate all reactions of fear: one may start suddenly if a door bangs. But you can eliminate the unhealthy fear that is superimposed on a child: fear of punishment, fear of an angry God, fear of an angry parent.