I have been researching Summerhill and other related schools recently and just want to thank skirk64 for that awesome video, darkly funny but also bleakly authentic.
Readers may be interested in this documentary
Summerhill at 70
the video includess children being taught massage at school and also the er, rather unusual, "Pairing Up" ceremony, a kind of temporary marriage ceremony for children where they vow to use their bodies to give their partner pleasure.
The founder of Summerhill, A S Neill, was a massive fan of the controversial psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, a proponent of gennital massage as a from of psychotherapy.
From Neill’s wiki page
A S Neill
Emotional education trumped intellectual needs, in Neill's eyes, and he was associated with anti-intellectualism.[42] In actuality, he had a personal interest in scholarship and used his autobiography near the end of his life to profess the necessity of both emotion and intellect in education,[43] though he often took jabs at what he saw to be education's overemphasis on book-learning.[44] Neill felt that an emotional education freed the intellect to follow what it pleased, and that children required an emotional education to keep up with their own gradual developmental needs. This education usually entailed copious amounts of play and distance from the adult anxieties of work and ambition.[45] Neill was influenced by Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis, Homer Lane's interpretation of Freud, and later, by the unorthodox sexual theories of Wilhelm Reich. The reverence for Reich appears in the abundant correspondence between them.[46] Neill accepted Reich's claims about cosmic energy and his utopian ideas on human sexuality. In Reich's view, "discharge" of sexual energy leads to happiness, whereas lack of such discharge leads to unhappiness and "rigidity". Although not a trained therapist, Neill gave psychoanalytic private lessons to individual children, designed to unblock impasses in their inner energies. Neill also offered body massage, as suggested by Reich. Neill later found that freedom cured better than this therapy.[16]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._S._Neill
A school where the teachers held bizarre beliefs about children being sexually repressed and that pretty much all of society’s ills spring from sexual repression, especially the sexual repression of children, I mean what could go wrong? Oh wait….