A friend of AS Neill's progressive Summerhill School, Mackenzie took the principles of free schooling into the State system. He aimed to develop a "living education": a holistic process that could only take place in a climate of mutual respect and support. Mackenzie criticised formal education as a brutalising "machine" that wrote off too many young people through a reliance on the examination system.
But this is no sanitised account and critical reflections are given about both the realities of challenging an entrenched system and the difficulties of working in a poverty-stricken area. The ambivalence of the local authority is explored, as are the tensions with some parents over the casual approach to exams.
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