Visitors to Summerhill must often get an odd impression about
us, for sometimes we all talk about toilets. I think it is absolutely
necessary to do so. I find that every child is interested in feces.

So much has been written about a child's interest in his feces
and urine that I expected to learn a lot by observing my infant
daughter. However, she showed no interest at all nor any dis-
gust. She had no desire to play with her body products. But
when she was three, a friend of hers--a girl a year older who
had been trained to be clean--introduced her to a hole-and-cor-
ner excrement game marked by much whispering and shame
and guilty giggling. It was a tiresome game and we could do
nothing about it, knowing that to interfere would be to risk in-
hibition. Luckily, Zoë soon tired of the other little girl's one-
track activities, and the feces game came to a end.

Adults seldom realize that there is nothing shocking to a
child in feces and smells. It is the shocked attitude of the adult
that makes the child conscience-stricken. I recall a girl of eleven
who came to Summerhill. Her only interest in life was toilets.
Her delight was to peep through the keyhole. I promptly
changed her lessons from geography to toilets, making her
very happy. After ten days, I made a remark about toilets. "Don't
want to hear about them," she said wearily. "I'm fed up talking
about toilets."

Another pupil, a boy, could not take an interest in any lesson
because he was so preoccupied with excrement and its like-
nesses. I knew that only when he had exhausted this interest
would he be able to go on to mathematics. And so it was.

A teacher's work is simple: find out where a child's interest

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