To be clear, Summerhill is a book by A.S. Neill that I've never read, and it's apparently named after an English boarding school. According to Wikipedia:
Summerhill, founded in the 1920s, is run as a children's democracy under Neill's educational philosophy of self-regulation, where kids choose whether to go to lessons and how they want to live freely without imposing on others. The school makes its rules at a weekly schoolwide meeting where students and teachers each have one vote alike.
The book was apparently well-received at the time of its release in 1960; it sold two million copies over the next decade, was included in over 600 American university courses, and inspired a wave of copycat schools, as well as an education reform movement. Today, however, it seems very few people have heard of it.
I stumbled upon this book while reading a book that I assumed would be completely unrelated to education called Dungeon Hacks by David L. Craddock. One of the games it covers, NetHack--which was one of the first open-source projects in history, went on to influence the design of many modern video games, and is still being worked on today--was ultimately created in the early 1980s by a group of high school students from Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Lincoln, Massachussets. The book contains an interview with their teacher, Brian Harvey, who sparked a love for computer programming in his students and cites Summerhill as an influence in his pedagogy.
As someone who taught computer science to students from the early 1980s through to 2013--he recently retired but still works on education-related projects at UC Berkeley--I think that Harvey could be a fascinating interview candidate for American RadioWorks. Here's one part of the interview that particularly struck me:
Craddock: Did you encounter much resistance from faculty, administration, and/or parents when you proposed creating an open computer lab where teenagers would be allowed to have (mostly, but not quite totally) free reign over equipment worth thousands of dollars?
Harvey: Surprisingly little. It really matters that computers were rare back then. It's not like now, when everyone sees programming as a survival skill akin to literacy. I'd never get away with it today, but then computer programming was like art or drama, an elective that wasn't going to get anyone into college or keep them out.
This reminds me of some of today's arguments against making Algebra II a pre-requisite for graduation: when a class isn't an elective, the stakes are raised and it becomes harder to experiment and innovate pedagogically.
While I recognize that I was quite privileged growing up in the 1980s and 1990s with a personal computer all to myself, it was potentially the fact that computers were a refuge from school (and everything else that stressed me out) that made me love them so much. Most of today's advertised "carrots" used to excite kids about learning to code would have actively repelled me from the activity. If I were a kid today, it's teachers like Harvey who would have excited me about programming, rather than making it feel like the new plastics.
(Of course, there's nothing wrong with wanting to enter a field because it's lucrative, but it should also be noted that the incentive a teacher uses to motivate one student could just as easily demotivate another.)
In any case, I should also mention that there's a lot of skepticism about how well the unstructured, democratic ideas of Summerhill and Harvey could scale. Harvey mentions that the school he taught at was "rich", for example, which may indicate that some of his practices may not have fared as well in a low-income neighborhood where the home lives of the student population may have been more stressful. That said, a retrospective on this intriguing educational philosophy could be interesting.