Eureka! Institutional Repository

Education is a key social factor and even today the child's position in education is challenged by various perceptions about the role, the rights and obligations of the child in the educational and pedagogical process. At the beginning of the 20th century, the rupture with the traditional education determined by the state and the church has created new, liberal perceptions of education, which led to efforts and experiments to renew the schools, mainly in Europe. At that time, the pedagogue A.S. Neil creates the Summerhill School, α school where children are free to play, study, decide, and take part in social context processes where kids are equal to adults. Today, shifting the question of education and the position of the child within it, it is worth reexamining Greek education and studying the perceptions that have been established in an attempt to identify the dominant perceptions and the principles according to which it works, to envision its future and to put scientific data on its renewal. The followed methodology of this review is the comparative study of the two systems: the anti- authoritarian system and the results of its implementation at the school Summerhill, founded by A.S. Neill, and the system of Greek education in modern Greece, a system fulfil of efforts and proposals for effective education. The results of the study show that Greece, which is already in a precarious position, in a profound economic and social crisis, has to overcome many obstacles and still go a long way in order to successfully and decisively adopt the principles of anti-authoritarian education. On the one hand, Greece is pressed by the supervisors to carry out reforms that have characteristics in this direction but on the other hand it has to fight internally with the bureaucratic complications of its sections, the training needs and the improvement of the teachers, the integration of the children of minority groups and finally the culture that has been created about education in Greek society and in Greek families