1) Hello, dear Joe Satriani. Mostly I write really huge letters, but this time I guess I have to be brief... I am just somebody longhaired person from the Earth who want to share an extremely important information with you, and, I hope, you will like it and will keep spreading all over the world. There is book "Summerhill - A Radical Approach To Child Rearing" written by A. S. Neil in 1960 and already translated at least to 16 languages, but it is not so well-known as I wish it to be.

Here are english and italian texts (actually I already found 8 texts, not just 2): http://rghost.net/48233842 http://rghost.net/48233961

This profound, warm, in very simple way written book, will shake your outlook on education and on life in general. Believe it or not. There is no any thoughtless word put in this truly titanic book. Here are some quotes, but I guess I could quote it endlessly:

"Summerhill began as an experimental school. It is no longer such; it is now a demonstration school; for it demonstrates that freedom works. When my first wife and I began the school, we had one main idea: to make the school fit the child--instead of making the child fit the school."

"Logically, Summerhill is a place in which people who have the innate ability and wish to be scholars will be scholars; while those who are only fit to sweep the streets will sweep the streets. But we have not produced a street cleaner so far. Nor do I write this snobbishly, for I would rather see a school produce a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar."

"I find that the parent who worries most about Billy’s learning to read and write is one who feels a failure in life because of lack of educational attainment. It is the self-disapproving parent who believes in strict discipline. The jovial man-about-town with a stock of obscene stories will sternly reprove his son for talking about excrement. The untruthful mother will spank her child for lying. I have seen a man, with pipe in mouth, whipping his son for smoking. I have heard a man say as he hit his son of twelve, “I’ll teach you to swear, you little bastard.” When I remonstrated, he said glibly, “It’s different when I curse. He’s just a kid.” "

"The children have classes usually according to their age, but sometimes according to their interests. We have no new methods of teaching, because we do not consider that teaching in itself matters very much. Whether a school has or has not a special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long division is of no importance except to those who want to learn it. And the child who wants to learn long division will learn it no matter how it is taught. Children who come to Summerhill as kindergartens attend lessons from the beginning of their stay; but pupils from other schools vow that they will never attend any beastly lessons again at any time. They play and cycle and get in people’s way, but they fight shy of lessons. This sometimes goes on for months. The recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. Our record case was a girl from a convent. She loafed for three years. The average period of recovery from lesson aversion is three months."

"The school evades the basic issue: All the Greek and math and history in the world will not help to make the home more loving, the child free from inhibitions, the parent free of neurosis."

2) "Most of the schoolwork that adolescents do is simply a waste of time, of energy, of patience. It robs youth of its right to play and play and play; it puts old heads on young shoulders.When I lecture to students at teacher training colleges and universities, I am often shocked at the ungrownupness of these lads and lasses stuffed with useless knowledge. They know a lot; they shine in dialectics; they can quote the classics but in their outlook on life many of them are infants. For they have been taught to know, but have not been allowed to feel. These students are friendly, pleasant eager, but something is lacking-- the emotional factor, the power to subordinate thinking to feeling. I talk to these of a world they have missed and go on missing. Their textbooks do not deal with human character, or with love, or with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming only at standards of book learning -goes on separating the head from the heart."

"The molded, conditioned, disciplined, repressed child--the unfree child, whose name is Legion, lives in every corner of the world. He lives in our town just across the street. He sits at a dull desk in a dull school and later, he sits at a duller desk in an office or on a factory bench. He is docile, prone to obey authority, fearful of criticism, and almost fanatical in his desire to be normal, conventional, and correct. He accepts what he has been taught almost without question; and he hands down all his complexes and fears and frustrations to his children. Psychologists have contended that most of the psychic damage to a child is done in the first five years of life. It is possibly nearer the truth to say that in the first five months, or in the first five weeks or perhaps, even in the first five minutes, damage can be done to a child that will last a lifetime. Unfreedom begins with birth. Nay, it begins long before birth. If a repressed woman with a rigid body bears a child, who can say what effect the maternal rigidity has on the newborn baby! It may be no exaggeration to say that all children in our civilization are born in a life-disapproving atmosphere. The time table feeding advocates are basically anti-pleasure. They want the child to be disciplined in feeding because non-timetable feeding suggestsorgastic pleasure at the breast. The nutriment argument is usually a rationalization; the deep motive is to mold the child into a disciplined creature who will put duty before pleasure."

4) "In the past, my main work was not teaching but the giving of “Private Lessons.” Most of the children required psychological attention, but there were always some who had just come from other schools, and the private lessons were intended to hasten their adoption to freedom. If a child is all tied up inside, he cannot adapt himself to being free. The P.Ls. were informal talks by the fireside. I sat with a pipe in my mouth, and the child could smoke, too, if he liked. The cigarette was often the means of breaking the ice. Once I asked a boy of fourteen to come and have a chat with me. He had just come to Summerhill from a typical private school I noticed that his fingers were yellow with nicotine, so I took out my pack of cigarettes and offered it to him. “Thanks,” he stammered, “but I don’t smoke, sir.” “Take one, you damned liar,” I said with a smile, and he took one. I was killing two birds with one stone. Here was a boy to whom headmasters were stern, moral disciplinarian to be cheated every time. By offering him a cigarette, I was showing that I approved of his smoking. By calling him a damned liar, I was meeting him on his own level. At the same time, I was attacking his authority complex by showing him that a headmaster could swear easily and cheerfully. I wish I could have photographed his facial expression during that first interview. He had been expelled from his previous school for stealing. “I hear you are a bit of a crook,” I said “What’s your best way of swindling the railway company?” “I never tried to swindle it, sir.” “Oh,” I said, “that won’t do. You must have a try. I know lots of ways,” and I told him a few. He gaped. This surely was a madhouse he had come to. The principal of the school telling him how to be a better crook? Years later, he told me that that interview was the biggest shock of his life."

"On with the dance-but it must be danced according to the rules. And the strange thing is that the crowd will accept the rules as a crowd, while at the same time the individuals composing the crowd may be unanimous in hating the rules. To me a London ballroom symbolizes what England is. Dancing which should be an individual and creative pleasure, it reduced to a stiff walk. One couple dances just like another couple. Crowd conservatism prevents most dancers from being original. Yet the joy of dancing is the joy of invention. When invention is left out, dancing becomes mechanical and dull. English dancing fully expresses the English fear of emotion and originality. If there is no room for freedom in such a pleasure as dancing how can we expect to find it in the more serious aspects of life?"

5) "A boy of eleven who came to Summerhill had the habit of incendiarism, among other habits. He had been thrashed by his father and by his teachers. Worse still, he had been taught the narrow religion of hell fire and an angry God. Soon after coming to Summerhill, he took a bottle of gasoline and poured it into a vat of paint and turpentine. Then he set fire to the mixture. The hour was saved only by the energy of two servants. I took him to my room. “What is fire?” I asked. “It burns,” he said. “What sort of a fire do you think of now?” I continued. “Hell,” he said. “And the bottle?” “A long thing with a hole at the end,” he answered. (Long pause.) “Tell me more about this long thing with a hole in the end,” I said. “My peter,” he said awkwardly, “has a hole at the end.” “Tell me about your peter,” I said kindly. “Do you ever touch it?” “Not now. I used to, but I don’t now.” “Why not?” “Because Mr. X [his last schoolmaster] told me that it was the greatest sin in the world.” I concluded that his fire making was a substituted act for masturbation. I told him that Mr. X was quite wrong, that his peter was no better and no worse than his nose or his ear. From that day on, his interest in fire went away."

Here is the quote from the very beginning of the book...
"A Word of Introduction In psychology, no man knows very much. The inner forces of human life are still largely hidden from us. Since Freud’s genius made it alive, psychology has gone far; but it is still a new science, mapping out the coast of an unknown continent. Fifty years hence, psychologists will very likely smile at our ignorance of today. Since I left education and took up child psychology, I have had all sorts of children to deal with - incendiaries, thieves, liars bed-wetters and bad-tempered children. Years of intensive work in child training has convinced me that I know comparatively little of the forces that motivate life. I am convinced, however, that parents who have had to deal with only their own children know much less than I do. It is because I believe that a difficult child is nearly always made difficult by wrong treatment at home that I dare address parents. What is the province of psychology? I suggest the word curing. But what kind of curing? I do not want to be cured of my habit of choosing the colors orange and black; nor do I want to be cured of smoking; nor of my liking for a bottle of beer. No teacher has the right to cure a child of making noises on a drum. The only curing that should be practiced is the curing of unhappiness. The difficult child is the child who is unhappy. He is at war with himself; and in consequence, he is at war with the world. The difficult adult is in the same boat. No happy man ever disturbed a meeting or preached a war, or lynched a Negro. No happy woman ever nagged her husband or her children. No happy man ever committed a murder or a theft. No happy employer ever frightened his employees. All crimes, all hatred, all wars can be reduced to unhappiness. This book is an attempt to show how unhappiness arises, how it ruins human lives, and how children can be reared so that much of this unhappiness will never arise. More than that, this book is the story of a place--Summerhill --where children’s unhappiness is cured and, more important, where children are reared in happiness."

Here is torrent-link to the English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Serbian, Polish, Hindi, Marathi texts:
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4485614

Or here (same files, but packed in "tar.gz" format):
english, italian, russian, hindi, marathi: http://rghost.net/48202064
spanish: http://rghost.net/48202107
polish: http://rghost.net/48201845
serbian: http://rghost.net/48201924