Alexander Sutherland Neill (17 October 1883 – 23 September 1973) was a Scottish educator and author known for his school, Summerhill, and its philosophy of freedom from adult coercion and community self-governance.

[3] His father was the village dominie (Scottish schoolmaster) of Kingsmuir, near Forfar in eastern Scotland, and his mother had been a teacher before her marriage.

He taught a wider range of topics as his self-confidence grew, and he developed an interest in mathematics from the Forfar Academy maths master.

After studying with the priest and the Forfar math master, Neill passed his university entrance exam and preliminary teacher's certification.

[11] Neill was excluded from cultural events due to his lack of funds, but participated in sports, showed interest in the military, and wrote for The Student (the university magazine) and the Glasgow Herald.

He took a new job as art editor of the Piccadilly Magazine, but its operations were halted by the 1914 onset of World War I,[14] in which he served as an officer in the army.

The diary he wrote for this year was published as a book, A Dominie's Log, in November 1915 by Herbert Jenkins, and received good reviews for its humour and narrative style.

[4] Neill used to offer psychoanalytic therapy ("private lessons", since he was not a licensed therapist[16]) for children who arrived as delinquents from other institutions, but later found love, affirmation and freedom to be better cures.

[21] Bailey criticized Neill's absolution of responsibility for his pupils' academic performance, and his view that charismatic instruction was a form of persuasion that weakened child autonomy.

[27] Together with Homer Lane, Neill supported personal freedoms for children to live as they please without adult interference, and called this position "on the side of the child".

[25] Neill's practice can be summarised as providing children with space, time, and empowerment for personal exploration and with freedom from adult fear and coercion.

He felt that children turned to self-hate and internal hostility when denied an outlet for expression in adult systems of emotional regulation and manipulation.

[36] Bailey also dubbed Neill's views on intelligence as "innatist" and fatalist – that children had naturally set capabilities and limitations.

[37] Neill saw contemporary interventionist practice as doing harm by emphasising conformity and stifling children's natural drive to do as they please.

Although not a trained therapist, Neill gave psychoanalytic private lessons to individual children, designed to unblock impasses in their inner energies.

[47] Bailey also compared Neill's thoughts on coercion to those of Godwin, who felt that regulation through reward and punishment stunted growth.

[26] Denis Lawton likened Neill's ideas to Rousseauan "negative education", where children discover for themselves instead of receiving instruction.

[49] Peter Hobson found Neill's philosophy of education incomplete, oversimplified, without a "coherent theory of knowledge", and too dependent on his experience instead of philosophical position.

[51] Joel Spring likened Neill's views on the family to that of Mary Wollstonecraft, in that the parents would share power equally.

[58] Bailey wrote that Neill did not have full faith in self-regulation due to his emphasis on the necessity of making specific environments for children.

[55] Robin Barrow argued that Neill's idea of self-regulation was contradictory, when its intent was, more simply, the extent to which children need to abide by external restraints.

[62] His daughter says that although he was seen as benign he allowed Ena May Neill to berate the weekly meetings and she increasingly ran the school becoming the head, officially, when he died.

[63] Summerhill sought to produce individualists conscious of their surrounding social order, and Neill chose the self-governance of Homer Lane's Little Commonwealth for the basis of that lesson.

Bailey added that the unpretentious book's message was easier to impart than Deweyan thought, and that its release inspired Neill's education critic contemporaries as to the viability of their ideas.

Max Rafferty called Summerhill "a caricature of education" and felt threatened by the implications of "the spread of Neill's hedonism to the majority of the next generation".

[73] Others criticized Neill for his progressive ideals despite agreement on his critique of traditional schools, and bemoaned his "outdated radicalism" and "dangerously enthusiastic following in teaching training institutions".

[74] Richard Bailey wrote that Summerhill received most of its public attention in the 1920s to 1930s and in the 1960s to 1970s, which were eras of social change (progressivism and the counterculture, respectively).

Journal reviews called Neill "the most popular writer on education today" and said of his works, "Nearly all the more alive and up-to-date teachers in Britain have read and argued about his notions".

[citation needed] Timothy Gray linked the release of Summerhill with the rise of writers Herb Kohl, Jonathan Kozol, Neil Postman, and Ivan Illich.

Richard Bailey wrote that Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner's followers were more evangelical in character, and that Neill deterred would-be devotees.