Summerhill School
Festiniog, North Wales
My dear Reich,February 5, 1941I got your letter just as I went on holiday to my oId school in
Suffolk. You did sound a little reactionary, for America can't be a
Paradise with so many unemployed and so many millionaires. But I
am not going to write a political letter.
We had an Xmas visitor, a refugee woman scientist, biologist. She
read Die Bione and said she would put her criticisms on paper for me
so that I could send them to you. She has not done so yet, but her argu
ment is that your sterilisation is weak all the time, that no one knows
that all life is killed in incandescent heat, etc. I suppose you have had
the same argument from many of them. If she sends the criticism I'll
forward it to you at once.
I am at present spending my valuable time teaching maths, but am
trying to get a teacher so that I can get back to my other work, for
which I feel ready now. Of course the uncertainty of the future makes
it all so difficult. In the coming world what place will there be for
freedom in education? We are moving to State Control of everything,
and after the war the middle class may not be able to send their children
to private schools. All schools will be State ones, and I can't see myself
in a State school with control from above. It is queer that only under
Capitalism have I been able to be a pioneer in education. I know what
Nazism would have done with me, but what would a Communist State
do with me? I couldn't make children sing the Red Flag or study Marx.
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