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‘Little Mussolini’ and the ‘parasite poets’ Psychoanalytic pedagogy, modernism, and the illegible child

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posted on 2023-06-10, 02:00 authored by Helen TysonHelen Tyson
In 1927, Dora and Bertrand Russell, inspired by other educational pioneers including Homer Lane, A. S. Neill, Maria Montessori, and Rachel McMillan, had opened Beacon Hill School on the South Downs in Sussex. Responding to Russell’s article, one correspondent wrote in to denounce the practice of group composition as a form of ‘séance’, in which one ‘little Mussolini’ must be dictating to ‘several little parasite poets, whose acquisitive faculties are being unhealthily exercised by the process of communal authorship’. Bertrand Russell’s 1931 account of the school was, nonetheless, a passionate articulation of the educational ideals underpinning the school—and it provoked a vehement debate. In Russell’s romantic portrait of free childhood, he makes a crucial set of links between the child’s freedom from external taboos, the child’s unique access to an ‘exact and expressive’ form of language, and the idea of the school as a miniature democracy.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Routledge

Page range

184-215

Pages

252.0

Book title

Wild analysis: from the couch to cultural and political life

Place of publication

Abingdon, Oxon

ISBN

9781032061153

Series

New library of psychoanalysis 'Beyond the couch' series

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Elizabeth Sarah Coles, Helen Tyson, Shaul Bar-Haim

Legacy Posted Date

2021-12-13

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2023-04-14

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2022-01-04

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